Song of the Day: Memoryhouse--"Lately (Deuxieme)"

"Lately (deuxieme)"

I was originally going to write this post about Bat for Lashes but I decided to put that post on hold and talk about this band called Memoryhouse and this really lovely track of theirs, "Lately (Deuxieme)."

This is the first I've ever heard of the band and I'm really in love with the song, mostly because it features the reverb loop used prominently by Jon Brion throughout the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind soundtrack:

I'm not entirely sure music bloggers have picked up on the sampling but I'm also not entirely sure everyone else in the world is as sonically obsessed with Jon Brion as I am.

Exhibit A) Upon seeing the film Punchdrunk Love for the first time, I recognized Jon Brion as the composer based on the score's clever usage of a miniature piano. My film professor was boggled.

Exhibit B) The name of this blog.

Anyway, Memoryhouse. To me, "Lately" is like 3 minutes of wonder, blissed-out wonder. I think it has something to do with the bass drum undercurrent rippling beneath the Eternal Sunshine loop. It's like a summer stormcloud that occasionally becomes a muted dance synth. Muted wonder, maybe. Possibly because Eternal Sunshine is so indelibly associated with this track, it makes me think of two kids on a beach, holding hands and looking up while the tide comes in.

The track is introduced by a turntable needle clicking into position on a record and we listen to the looped reverb. Which, of course, takes me to the end credits of Eternal Sunshine when the two characters are forever captured in a film reel of a snowball fight. The clip snags and repeats itself, over and over, possibly into eternity, begging the question of whether or not the lovers are meant to repeat their same mistakes again and again, eternally to the point of timelessness.

The lyrics, from what I can tell, are as follows:

Lately, I'm not sleeping

I'm not breathing

without machine

Lately, my heart's been breaking

my heart's been breaking

through the seam.

Shut me off

Shut me off

Shut me off

Shut me off

I'm not sure a refrain has been so piercing since Wait, they don't love you like I love you. The song itself is so dreamy and lo-fi and unobtrusive that it's...jarring to listen to the sorrow in the verses, the poignant sensation of being so vulnerable--unable to breath without aid--in the wake of heartbreak.

Download Memoryhouse's new EP, "The Years" here.

This is a Memoryhouse cover of my favorite Grizzly Bear track, "Foreground." How great is this group??