THE ELSE

Before that project had a name, all my files were just in a folder called "During the War." It's not the topic but it is the backdrop. It was the thing that's happening that's just sort of poisoning everything around it.

­— John Linnell

Mysterious figures in the snow, holding briefcases, looking at you; looking for approval. The trees are dead. You cannot make out their faces. Se aprovechan — they take advantage. This was the intended outcome.

It's easy to say that The Else is about Iraq, because the Johns have gone more or less on record saying that it's got a tinge of Iraq to it. That's true, for sure, but it exists at a more surface level than anything else; it's like saying that the Star Wars prequels are about Iraq. Yes, they are, and that's an important aspect of them, but if you go down that rabbit hole then you derive that Jar Jar Binks is meant to represent Dubya. It's not worth it.

So what is The Else doing in its largely grounded, not-particularly-whimsical 38 minute runtime? It talks about relationships, between people and other people, between people and systems, between people and those in power. Accursed forces lurk in the background, threatening the sanity of those who look at it too hard. There is a badness lurking in the background of The Else. Something is wrong, and everyone knows it on some level. Right?

Does it matter? You try to escape and compartmentalize the nightmares around you, and all you can say is I'm Impressed; you find that your head's nodding yes, but your legs do not follow. One day, you will have been against this. But you're caught up in the raw, destructive power, and you've always been told that the badness is good.

The Else focuses largely on a motif of divides between the conscious and the subconscious mind, given the overarching theme of an ever-present destructive force tainting everything around. In this way, I'm Impressed is about the knowledge on a primal level, that of the body, rejecting the destruction, while the mind is forced to capitulate. There is something in the narrator that does not want this.

From here, we begin to get into songs about relationships; and this album has plenty of songs about relationships, specifically ones that are in disrepair. Take Out The Trash is a relatively standard breakup song at first glance, but instead begins to focus on the notion that some boys are the same; in this way, the titular "trash" is not a singular man, but an ideology largely spread among men.

I will leave it to you to determine what this ideology is, but it leads to numbness, an inability to express emotions in a genuine fashion since everything's already falling apart. It's a malleable state of an Upside Down Frown, one where se aprovechan. The narrator of this song's inability to genuinely express emotions is causing damage to his relationship; he's caught up in the 24/7 news cycle of it all, and it leads to an intended nihilism.

Even in the face of unfathomable depression caused by very real and material circumstances, things can begin to fall into disrepair. Withered Hope discusses a relationship in which one side just doesn't love themself; they're depressed, because something is wrong, but they can't put a finger on what it is. It's tearing them apart. Contrecoup, then, is the opposite; things are bad in a way that feels like blunt force trauma to the head, and they need a distraction; that distraction is a relationship, in this case.

Idle hands are the devil's playthings, after all, and if there's something wrong everywhere, you need to get your mind off it somehow. This is where Climbing The Walls and Feign Amnesia come in; songs about compartmentalization, the former being through work as escape and the latter as, well, feigning amnesia. It's easy to pretend that nothing is wrong when you're too busy to look at the world around you. It's not fun, but it keeps you sane. We've done it.

This is where The Mesopotamians begins to show its meaning. On the surface, it's about a silly rock band with a historical theme to it. Many people think that it's supposed to say something about The Beatles, to which I'd just go "why does it matter". It's an escape mechanism, one that's based in misunderstandings of history: a desire to retvrn. It's spending your time in a pit, and that pit is making music. In a way, it's almost anti-TMBG, in a way that's reminiscent of The Day's knowledge that protest music does nothing.

But it's about Dubya, right? It's gotta be about Dubya. All of this is because Iraq, there's no systems of power here. I keep talking about "badness" here, a prevailing sense that something is wrong. That badness is Dubya, right? Wrong. The Cap'm discusses the performative nature of the president's seat, one in which clothes are the most important thing, one where optics is everything. In this way, the song makes the point that this would have happened regardless of who held office, that the systems are the real enemy. It's still happening now. With The Dark expands on this theme by getting tired of [...] nautical dreams; in the context of The Cap'm, these dreams are those of power. You aren't a captain, you're a pirate; you are leading the charge of the wrong.

My largest gripe with this album, ultimately, is the inclusion of The Shadow Government. I don't find The Shadow Government interesting and I think it wields a sledgehammer when a chisel will do. This album already isn't subtle; but you didn't need to scream the themes of it into my face. It feels like it almost doesn't respect me, to a degree, but that's being uncharitable. It's a fine track.