Commemoration Day
Sodastream is dead, long live Sodastream. In this commemoration post, Emmy Hennings, a previous guest of Melbs, writes of this much-loved Melbourne duo. Their MySpace profile suggests one final show on April 20th.
If pressed to characterise Karl Smith’s lyrical style – perhaps for those handful of curious folk who might yet discover Sodastream in the wake of their sad break-up – I would call it elliptical. He leaves clues for the listener but never provides an entire story. Always, he writes and sings from within the story – he’s never the omnipotent narrator – but it’s generally hard to tell just which character he might be in any given song. Even from the inside there’s a certain distance he keeps up, an understated calm, however much the words sound as if they were written in the aftermath of startling violence. And they often do.
There’s elliptical, and then there’s elliptic, which is the shape of Sodastream’s music. Pete Cohen’s double bass moves so unhurriedly from finger-by-finger plucking to a back-and-forth sway – the distinctive, measured curve that a bow traces in the air – like the stepping-stones of a pond transformed into a boat’s hull. His bass lines give the duo’s arrangements buoyancy but also pull, an inexorable momentum. Smith’s acoustic guitar ripples out in repeated patterns, and his vocal melodies curl with his phrases.
‘Cause you got away
The way it turned on your wedding day
I’ve been listening to “Wedding Day” for more than seven years and I know that I’ll never get to the bottom of it – I’m still not even sure whether the lyric is ‘away’ or ‘a way’; whether the refrain is about watching somebody escape or about being transfixed by their stubbornness. All I know is that when Smith sings it the melody folds under and then over like page of a book, drawing the story onwards. Then there’s a pause while the bass switches texture, and now viola joins in too: long, drawn-out notes – so much drama from so few elements.
- Sodastream
- Wedding Day
- from Looks Like A Russian
Of course, a wedding is an inherently dramatic event: loaded with symbolism, laced with fervid emotion, played out by a big cast – rich pickings for the observant writer. But “Wedding Day’ is barely about a wedding; it’s about what such a compressed, heated event might leave in its wake: emotional fatigue and claustrophobia and - cruelly, paradoxically - an aching loneliness.
There’s blood on the toilet seat
And heaven is coming down to hold me
That’s the opening couplet, ushered into a sonic space that’s close to empty, a mere brush of drums and muted bass strings played with the pads of fingers; a guitar part yet to blossom into full chords. Twice the arrangement rises and falls, building in urgency and falling away again; twice the lyric holds out a dark shard:
I know it’s late but I can
Still hear them fucking in the other room
And so we move from bath to bed of an unlit house, from blood seen to breath overheard, and both sound as violent as each other – the profanity delivered with just enough pressure from behind the teeth to make the tone contemptuous – yet by the time the songs winds its way to a coda a certain reverie has taken over. It’s forty seconds of exhaustion, rather than contentment, dream-like, as if waking from bad sleep. Cohen’s bass has moved into a higher register, tremulous and scraping, and the acoustic guitar is in a holding pattern. It’s as if the whole arrangement is dispersing on a wind, changing element from water to air, but at the last moment a sudden, deep bowed note from Cohen anchors it back again, underlining Smith’s final lyrical question, a plea for context and certainty that could as easily be asked by a listener, seeking an answer to this unsettling, mysterious, very beautiful song:
On your wedding day
Don’t you want to give me anything?
And then it hangs, and watching Sodastream live over the years, waiting for “Wedding Day”, this was always the moment that I would enjoy most: a fractional pause before the audience’s reaction during which all the tension and promise of the song was still wholly unresolved. It was a mood that suited them. I hope that they play it at their final show; I only wish that I would be there.