With a name that made you smirk or wince when you spoke it, this electro-burlesque act from the noughties plastered the laddish triple J waves with guaranteed airplay numbers about rootin', tokin, snortin' and partayin'. So how come this? How come, from under the tide of motherfuckers on motorcycles and pussy towns this eerie tale of ghosted love emerged and took it place among the filth and japes?
Well, the answer's easy: Matt Ford can write a good song and forced this one into the ready made context of the band rather than sell it through a solo identity with the extra admin and PR bullshit that that would entail. Apart from everything else it stopped everyone who was a fan or all the naughtiness in their tracks when they heard it and so profoundly moved them that they almost forgot about 99% of the band's material.
In backgrounding this post I went through some online resources and found out that Ford co-wrote the big spooky epic pop song No Aphrodisiac for the Whitlams. I had no idea that was so but if he wrote this one the surprise of it dwindles rapidly.
Unsent Letter is a song of a man seeking contact after disconnection. He's broken up with a woman and now when he tries to talk to her he can't get past the weather. She doesn't hang up but there's nothing left there on the line. So he imagines himself driving around with a pair of girls. Nothing else matters or doesn't, though. He gives things up, starts others with no effect. At every turn, his thoughts and daydreams or ambitions return to her silence and his frustration at having created that. Even when he admits the part he played there is no resolution; it's just too engaging going over it again and again.
It's important that he suggests that he was the one who ended it. Without that this might just be another wallow. Here he knows he has made a mistake and because she can never be present at his best, most eloquent and pithy after-the-fact pleas all he can do is polish them further and move on ... but it's just too engaging going over it again.
The song doesn't start so much as lift in a slight breeze. Quiet wukkawukka guitar chords are raised by a synthetic tom tom without which they would just return to the dust. Ford's quiet voice begins with the line about trying to talk. A clanking like a train at a crossing appears briefly and a deep synth note swells like a cue in a horror movie. This is taken by an electric bass and a Rhodes piano on its slowest tremolo setting, lending a seasick wobble, and a light drum kit plays a skeletal shuffle for the chorus about driving around.
Then we get back to the inertia of the opening but bolstered by the bass and the drums. The guitar does not now or at any other time in the song, break out of its tiny insistence. The second chorus adds an organ which swells and then fades under the first line of the next verse. Then inertia again as the bass coaxes the guitar to keep aloft. Some whispered backwards percussion and another chorus with the organ returning but with an funereal solemnity. It takes the solo after the last chorus which falls back to inerita before fading out on the mournful figure. Silence.
While some double tracking appears to alter the vocal texture this is a solo vocal, one man against himself and the frayed mess around him, singing with minimal to no reverb, as his words, though they briefly rise to inspiration, keep falling to the floor. And nothing resolves. The song he wrote for her (this one) has only just been finished and joins the other unsent letters addressed to her care of someone somewhere better. The girls in the car with him are either ghosts of her or revenge bimbos but either way they are made of neurones and synapses, not flesh and blood.
The insistent regret that drives this song with its minor key harping reminiscent of folk music or timeless blues that circles around and could keep doing so well after lights out. It's gently paced but it's intense as this sadness is not self-pity but self-torture.
We have all gone through breakups and felt variously well-rid of people or cruelly used by them but there is always that one we never quite shake, the one we threw away. This is the one who appears in the shadows at every new time to remind us of what we had and will never have again and that WE were the ones who made sure of that. And, as we formulate again a replay of the last argument where we win, we remember that this is true, that our one shot at the great dream of a lifelong love was something we chose to annihilate.
We might have felt threatened by the intimacy or desolate that it didn't feel like it was enough. Whatever it was we are now greatly empowered by the experience and will just keep learning ... except it was us, we did that, we crushed someone because we weakened. The real one probably recovered and has long moved on to "something better" and can't take any contact with us past the weather. But, and this is where it really gets eerie, they are not the one we miss or the one we "talk" to when we can't do anything else. We talk to the ghost.
The video of this song from the time at first made me wince. It came at the end of a decade of serial killer chic at the movies and on tv. That genre's characteristic look and feel seemed force fed into the imagery, private operating rooms and confused looking women being taken by a man (played by the vocalist) while the palette desaturates and the angles and editing do the herky jerky. But the clip goes into far more interesting territory as the woman he's dressing up like a victim plays the comatose real one he's injured (take your pick of car accident, domestic violence or maybe just leave it at metaphor), eventually sitting beside her inert body on the hospital bed as the entire room begins to shake and shudder as though it's moving along a road.
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