Whiteout Conditions

Listen while you read:  Is it snowing?

Flying and feeling the ceiling
And barely dealing
And the faintest, the faintest of praises
Are too revealing
Such a waste of a beautiful day
Someone should say it
Such a waste of the only impossible, logical way in
A fly-in at LA was open
I wasn't hoping for a win
I was hoping for freedom
You couldn't beat 'em
So you crumbled, you doubled your dosage
You wanna go, said the inhibitor blocking the passage
That thing is massive

And the sky will come for you once
Just sit tight until it's done
The sky will come for you once
Just sit tight until it's done

Got so hooked on a feeling
I started dealing
In a stage of grief so demanding
I got a stand-in
Every radio buzzing, it wasn't the dream of the moment
Wasn't the current that carried me, keeping me going

Only want to get to work
But every morning, I'm too sick to drive
Suffering whiteout conditions
Forget the mission, just get out alive
. . . 

~  A.C. Newman (The New Pornographers)

In case you haven't figured this out yet, I am a big fan of coincidence (even though I believe that there's no such thing as coincidence). Lately, as I look for songs for the blog, I keep finding ones by bands that hail from Seattle or Vancouver BC. And, of course, that's where I'm headed in another week. Coincidence? If nothing else, I'm getting into a Northwest state of mind!

The New Pornoraphers are a Vancouver band. Their seventh album, Whiteout Conditions, was released a couple of months ago, and the song of the same title is getting a lot of airplay. It's a bouncy one with really cool rhyme, and I get happy when it comes on. Plus I just love Neko Case's voice and have for a long time. So who knew that the fast-paced lyrics were about being depressed? In a review of the entire album, Diffuser said the collection of songs create "a balance between the dark and the light." Well, isn't that the way everything is supposed to be?

A Pitchfork review offers this: "Newman's high, handy vocals nudge out ahead of the busy synths and chipper drums to recall a repressive episode; he recounts days spent falling into a resentful hermitude, turning from windowpanes, before clawing his way back toward the light (a sunny day literally helps kick him out of his inertia)." Well, sometimes that's all it takes, right? A beautiful day. The sky will come for you once / Just sit tight until it's done. Neko makes the line "peal like a tourism brochure tagline," according to Pitchfork. She's got me sold. I'm there.

The term "whiteout conditions," well-known to those of us who live in the North country, refers to a weather condition in which visibility and contrast are severely reduced by snow. The horizon disappears and there are no reference points, making one experience a distorted perception of one's place in the landscape. Kind of sounds like depression, doesn't it? But eventually, the storm ends, the sun comes out, and one is reassured of his/her path.

Such a waste of a beautiful day
Wish you could be here