Battlestar Eclectic

I have a new favorite Stone Roses song. It’s more a tale of frustrated love than a love song, but it’s pretty and atmospheric.

I don’t know why people refer to the Stone Roses as being psychedelic rock. They simply had so much talent, so much chemistry and were so tuned in as a band that inspiration and ability soared. The Stone Roses’ music, when it inevitable waxes epic is more orchestral than hallucinogenic.

Ian George Brown’s voice goes down like sea-foam and treacle. (I’m American, so I don’t know what treacle is. It seems, by book description, to be akin to molasses.) It’s warm and melodic and romantic.

As for Brown’s lyrics, he is one of rock music’s best yet unacknowledged raconteurs. Listen to the simplicity, directness and extreme sense of place in B-side treasure/beachside treasure “Mersey Paradise.” It’s is a small, bright masterpiece, like a pretty rock or bit of sea glass you’d pick up at the shore.

Here are the lyrics:

River splashes against the rocks

And I scale a slope I hope the tracks won’t

Lead me down to dark black pits

or places where we fall to bits

If she were there

I’d hold her down

I’ll push her under while she drowns and

Couldn’t breathe and call for air

She doesn’t care for my despair

Or is it me? Or the one that’s wrong

You see it in the sea

River cool’s where I belong

In my Mersey paradise

As I stare an oil wheel comes

Sailing by and I feel like

Growing fins and falling in

With the bricks, the bikes, the rusty tin

I’ll swim along without a care

I’m eating sand when I need air

You can bet your life I’ll meet a pike

Who’ll wolf me down for tea tonight

I want to be where the drownings are

You see it in the sea

River cool’s where I belong

In my Mersey paradise

Isn’t it lovely when a wallowing, melancholy song is buoyed by rock ‘n’roll drums?

–Sarah Torribio

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