Flash Small Light Knives
The name “The Small Knives” carries a hint of violence that couldn’t be further from the band’s soft-voiced, alt-country imperative: The Small Knives’ tempo is barely pushed above a heart’s pulse; their chords are chosen, it seems, with all the heartbroken meaning in the world. They’re playing this Friday night (5th August) at Ding Dong, so it seems apt to turn the Melbs, umm, flashlight on them. “Flashlight” comes from Rain on Tin, their brilliant album of last year.
- The Small Knives
- Flashlight
- from Rain on Tin
- No longer available
Objectivity is impossible here: Rain on Tin is an album associated with a period in my life that’s far from sunny—a time of unexpected grief, shock and a pervasive sense of hopelessness.
If I dive in a river
Will the river drown me?
It’s hard to revisit the album for that reason, but the songs draw me back. And they, in turn, draw me back to phone calls bearing horrible news; fleeing this country to see my brother; staring out of windows at foreign terrain; discovering other cities, other languages; returning home to love and hope, then losing both again sooner than I imagined—but always with this music there.
Does the music intrinsically lend itself to this dewy-eyed plot, or did I just latch on to the nearest handy thing? There’s difficulty untangling all that, but I think it’s the music—the sound of that pedal steel, the resigned ache in the voice of Leo Mullins, the cosseting melancholy of it all: songs that “covered me like a shawl”. Warmth, stillness and silence was what I craved, even though I was a few thousand kilometres from home and wandering through rainy streets, teeming cities and boarding rattling, noisy trains. There was a cosmopolitan anonymity to those cities, a sense of loneliness in the foreign multitude—but it only ever seemed like a surrogate solitude, the kind you can create anywhere with a set of headphones and the right songs.
It’s forever going to be autumn-winter 2004 when I play “Flashlight”, even though the sharp edges of those days are blunt from repeated use, slowly shedding every detail but their solid essence: each new day passing and reminding me there’s no memory without forgetting.