Deportees :: "A Heart Like Yours (In A Time Like This)"

We need vanishing points. Those dots on the horizon, the end of a long and tragic orthogonal, represent some better bit of accomplishment, some better vision of the future. Of course, all things being relative, we never arrive there exactly. We move forward, a halting and bizarre procession, but we never capture those lost black dots at the edge of what we can see. There emerge new ones. We steel ourselves, rekindle optimism and proceed. We find a platitude that works in this moment. Deportees' enormous and mournful single, "A Heart Like Yours (In A Time Like This)" feels cut from this type of cloth. Big, pulsing, background vocals take a choral turn on a song that runs over six minutes and never raises above head height. No grand final movement saves the listener. There is no transfiguration, just a routinized march forward on lyrics like, "Save it for another world"; we assume he means "your heart" if we take the title at face value. Each choral loop offers a few glossy steps forward, but the outcome is no more or less defined at the end. The final lyric, "I miss you when you're gone" is the lone vanishing point on the horizon, any progress towards it receding and receding in kind.