Lyrics like, "something gets to die when something lives" are functionally meaningless, yet when thrown into the right type of sky-riding rock song, they can be later justified as a kind of pitch-perfect emotional fodder. Deportees, a band we posted about a few weeks back, do just this on older single, "Islands and Shores". Recalling a less bombastic Temper Trap, the down-cast guitars are set against a swirling mixture of synths, backing vocals and strings. The climactic lyric, the chorus, risks being just as un-utilitarian as the the one about living and dying. This time the band intones, "looking out for this love, looking out for us," as a choir of voices rise in the background and the arrangement reaches its high-water mark. Accomplishing meaning in reverse, Deportees build an architecture that gives weight to the lyrics inside it, even if those lyrics struggle to find to find the same weight at their center. When done right, and this qualifies, these moments and couplets can be recast as desperately important. A line like, "if it was up to me I'd give you all the oceans" pulled off the yearbook page and thrust, improbably and incredibly, into your short term memory.
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.
