Valentine's Scorecard

So, Vertigo is now the most popular film in history?  I prefer The Lady Vanishes and Marnie, I think, but all the same, good work.  To celebrate I watched a Hitchcock film that was new to me tonight, Shadow Of A Doubt.  It wasn't that great.  Pity.  Put me off my usual punning title-creation form, evidently.

CAMENA – VALENTINE AND THE SEA (Bear On A Bicycle free download single)

Jorge Luis Borges wrote a short – and we mean, like, paragraph short – story called “On Exactitude In Science”.  It riffed on an idea of Lewis Carroll’s concerning a 1:1 sized map, a map exactly the same size as the territory it described.  Just as the values of one generation are ignored or refuted by the next, in the story this cartographic marvel of one age becomes a later burden to the nation that once loved it, and they let it disintegrate, until the only fragments remaining exist in the desert, made into rough shelters by beggars and beasts. 

This story was brought to mind by the refrain “I’ve been looking at the world through a torn-up atlas” at the end of “Valentine And The Sea”, but in a way this tiny, sententious, crystalline little song seems fittingly Borgesian: it’s shorn of all peripheral decoration but it still feels lush, the lyrics are seemingly based on threadbare mythologies but end up enticingly mysterious.  It’s a strange track, a selection of barely related statements delivered in an intimate close harmony (at one point Saint Valentine seems to be swallowing the ocean, like the famous Chinese brother), over some glistening guitar and simple piano chords, and incredibly contemporary sounding, though delightfully sloppy, clicking drumstick rhythms.  It’s a gorgeous little jewel of a piece, and pulls off the clever trick of sounding exactly like Oxford pop in 2012, whilst also being fresh and invigorating: the sound of a wan, literate, asocial little brother locked up in Foals’ attic, perhaps.  The B side - if that terminology doesn’t show our age - “Monumentality”, is cut from exactly the same cloth, a few Beach Boys backing vocals and Moonie campfire handclaps tossed in along the way.  It’s as if someone had described a Fixers track to a library music hack and given them twenty minutes to knock up their own version.  It’s not quite as successful as “Valentine And The Sea”, but it still has a rough charm. 

If we were going to make a criticism of this excellent single, it’s that it seems to fall between two camps.  On one hand Camena could develop these pieces into a soothing organic groove something along the lines of Fridge, whereas on the other they could bolster the arrangements and turn them into proper songs – the line “I’ve been picking up dreams from my bedroom floor” reminds us a lot of early Spring Offensive, for example.   Then again, who wants music that makes taxonomic sense when these oddly shaped, inexplicable tunes demand one last listen to unlock their secrets?  As one of Oxford’s great pop bands once said, mysteries are good for you.