Express Trip
Broken Imaginary Time - Soundtrack of Our Lives (Newer Music Friday)
I’ve been on a hunt lately for the music I used to listen to when I was younger. The stuff that my parents had bought on iTunes & transferred to my iPod Nano, the CDs that were on repeat, the records that were flipped over to the beginning as soon as they ended. This past weekend, a totally random conversation between my Dad & I revealed the name of an album that I had been searching for endlessly, perhaps my greatest unsolved mystery to date being resolved just like that! That made me think about album covers that I had seen when I was a kid, and another that really left an impact on me was The Soundtrack of Our Lives’ rather unsettling cover for their album Behind the Music.
Truth be told, the cover freaked me out back then and still sort of does to this day. I guess that’s how things really burrow into your mind! The music within is just as eerie, but in that mysteriously dark sort of way that you fall into. No song on there has this effect as much as “Broken Imaginary Time”. At track five out of fifteen, it might seem easy to miss, but it catches the ear like no other. Somber and slow, it uses a droning organ and steady drum beat to pull on through. The vocals are soft but emotional, that sort of inflection that is characteristic of someone who really knows what they’re singing. The backing vocals may be my favorite detail of the song, these barely audible “ahh”s and echoes on the chorus that add to the already otherworldly sound. I’ve never really been able to place an emotion with this one, which makes it really interesting to listen to. I think there’s hints of defeat, of sadness with a slight bitter taste. Yet it ends with a resolve, a bright chord that stuns against what has been playing.
“Broken Imaginary Time” is like traveling to another planet and back in the span of five or so minutes, an express trip to space you can take whenever you press play. I think it’s one of the greatest “melting” songs of all time, the ones you can fall into and get lost in forever and always, and for that I am grateful.
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