Tomorrow’s World – Think of Me (track review)
Think of Me wears the benign mask of impenetrable ideas.
On the outside, it simply presents the record of an enamoured yet banal conversation; a commonplace occurence.
On the inside, the conversation captures the essence of what unites the two love doves, and the sense of intimacy offered by the track makes for a fertile ground for touching and thought-provoking ideas.
“Those who do not love each other are not separated”, wrote Simone Weil.
Think of Me sounds like the musical equivalent of this aphorism, an insight into the minds of two lovers far apart from one another, yet living in the rawest, simplest and most beautiful form of symbiosis.
Lou chants an assured and loving “think of me”, to which Dunckel replies with the same words, effectively making those lyrics an anthem to love. While this happens sequentially in the track, the two lines were most likely meant to be concurrent, what with the album being very cinematographic, and cinematography being notoriously lax in time-keeping.
In the song, we are essentially switching from one person to the next with little regards to time. If we push this idea further, even the mere idea of alterity is at stake. Aren’t those two lovers, whoever they are, on the exact same wavelength, living with and in each other? The voices might sound different, but the tone and the words are the same. In French, the loved one is sometimes poetically called “la moitié”, the half, and aren’t halves parts of one and the same block?
Such are the questions that can arise from a seemingly innocuous track.
The masterful production helps a lot: the ubiquitous vocals shroud us, resonate as if inside our heads. They go remarkably well with the overall feel of the song, a calm, flowing river – “everything flows, but as long as we’re flowing together, we’re fine” –, as hinted by the straightforward song structure and lack of contrast. Right until the “wake-up” at the end, everything feels really smooth and gentle on the inside, careless and oblivious to the outside.
Think of Me is one of those tracks that make me fall even deeper in love with music, reignite in me that ardour and awe towards music and its endless possibilities - not so much towards the ground-breaking avant-garde as towards all the tools that are already at hand, and the idea that magnificence can emerge from simplicity. How rhythm, timbres, orchestration, harmony, melodies, lyrics and structure can be combined in an unfathomable amount of different ways, only requiring the proper adjustments to convey whatever meaning it is we want to transmute.
Make a song that resonates with yourself and you’ll find other people reveling that piece of your mind, of your heart, and grasping your ideas in dazzling vividness. Your craziest ideas — the listener’s, too — will grow visceral, crystallize and blossom with each attentive listen. And among it all, you will always have those illuminating moments you cannot quite put words to, this wallowing in the light of a transcendental, intangible genius, an otherworldly source whose makings only you can perceive; your soul vibrating directly with what you hear, bypassing reason and understanding.
The same goes for the more general concept of musical preferences. With time, you might recognize some patterns in your likings, yet the reason for them remains irrefutably esoteric. All throughout your life, you will feel the need to quench that thirst; a part of your identity, of your self, you will ineluctably tend towards. Yet, in the end, it all remains magic.
And right there is the allure of art.
You might be interested in my first impressions and second impressions of their album, as well as my track-by-track commentary.