It's no long list of great songs about death in space.
David Bowie's "Space Oddity" and
the Long Winters' "The Commander Thinks Aloud" both address this area with deft; Bowie spitting a magically real heartbreak about the relationship between Major Tom and Ground Control; John Roderick of the Long Winters documenting in the assumed first-person the last moments of the Space Shuttle Columbia, ending with the repeated and echoing lyric, "The crew compartment's breaking up."
Wolf Parade's
"Yulia" off their tweaking and perfect 2010 record
Expo 86 addresses an apocryphal Soviet legend of cosmonauts hurriedly sent to beat Apollo 11 to the moon, their capsule shot a few degrees off course, sentenced to miss the lunar body and spin endlessly into space. It certainly adds some weight to Dan Boeckner's final lyrics, "There's nothing out here, nothing out here." On this re-imagining,
Dan Griffin parses "Yulia" down to its sparest iteration, vocals and acoustic guitar later backed with a cello in the final chilling movements. It is as beautiful as it is tragic. Like Bowie and Roderick's space disasters, this is destined for fatalism, bits of aluminum spinning in infinity.
Listen :: Dan Griffin - "Yulia" [Wolf Parade cover]
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