Niki N. Phaser

There is no point in showing off every one of Roger Waters’ musical merits, every Pink Floyd album he almost entirely written by himself or every legendary gig he was involved in. We’ll just concentrate on this track, Hello (I Love You), which featured on none of his albums, but on the soundtrack of The Last Mimzy and it was the best thing about that rather mediocre movie. In fact, this Howard Shore co-written song doesn’t even really fit that movie, only maybe in some of the lyrics (“The kids will have to separate Their future from our past”, “Your child can read you like a bedtime story”). It sounds far too dramatic and moody for a film about a sort of Terminator Teddy Bear sent from the future to protect a threatened mankind. With an acoustic background that will bring Bowie’s Space Oddity to mind, you’ll find that this track would fit better on some sort of romantic SF thriller about junkies in love with holograms. But, despite, its context and it’s video, Hello (I Love You) remains an interesting piece of music.

VIDEO

From all the other arts, music could best be compared to painting. A painter is able to communicate emotions through the images he creates. Sometimes, these are very complex, filled with all sorts of details, shades and colours and sometimes, they are very simple, just a few lines and yet they are still as strong, if not even more. In this respect, songs are very similar to paintings. Some are multilayered, with all sorts of sounds an instruments filling the sonic space, while others are very minimal, played on one instrument or composed of one melodic episode. The music of Vangelis is a good way of exemplifying this theory. He has plenty of tracks that use dozens of sounds and create an universe which offers something new to discover at every listen, but he also has very simple compositions which are very effective in creating moods.

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The only good thing that came from watching a lame movie by the name of Stealth was that I heard this song, Bug Eyes by dredg, lost somewhere on the end titles, if I’m not mistaken. dredg are regarded as some kind of experimental band, probably because they sometimes use a slide guitar (like on Bug Eyes) and the drummer, Dino Campanella also plays the piano. They seem to have the destiny of some crazy prog-rock outfit, but their music is actually very accessible and melodic, as you can hear in Bug Eyes. The song even has some of that urgency, common to the most popular emo-alternative bands like My Chemical Romance or 30 Seconds to Mars, but Gavin Hayes doesn’t sound like a child trying to sing black metal. Lyrically, Bug Eyes is quite abstract, but the chorus does conjure some 2001: A Space Odyssey images: “Your journey back to birth is haunting you, it’s haunting you,
Your departure from the earth is haunting you, it’s haunting you”. There is a lot of emotion in this song and it does sound natural, not induced by the band’s genre.

LISTEN TO LIVE VERSION HERE