mix: absolution (songs for mr caruthers)

[balladrie]

So I'm writing this story. It's 1912. There's a girl. She's a librarian. She slays vampires. I was pretty sure that was what the story was about. Until, of course, I actually started writing it. The girl's still telling the story, but the centre, the catalyst, has changed. In a lot of ways, the story is really about Rupert Caruthers, former teenage hoodlum of London's streets, who retreated into a quiet life of librarianship after dealing too deeply in black magics and opium and vampires, who was rescued from vampire thralldom by the government, who found himself bound in another kind of thralldom, using talents he doesn;t even think he should have in the government's employ, who buries his past in the foundations of a library and deliberately becomes as unassuming and harmless as possible, because he knows that if he doesn't watch himself, he is capable of horrible things that even he doesn't quite understand. Who spends several years being quietly and guiltily in love with his copper-haired assistant librarian, who also has a latent capacity for magics, and surely it is part of his penance (not atonement, he doesn't hope for that) never to let himself be in love with her (and anyway, he tells himself, he will probably kill her, somehow). Who becomes her teacher and companion when she tumbles, terrified and unwilling, into a life of slaying vampires. Who may or may not be a Tam Lin stand-in. Who, to my complete surprise, went from a one-off character of necessity into what may very well be the core of the story.

These are songs for Mr Caruthers, loud, fey, Victorianstreetpunk songs. There is also an unusual amount of singing saw (\o/). A companion, of sorts, to That Light.






absolution.

1. E.S.P. | uiscedwr
instrumental

2. COAL | blackbird raum
i am flesh and you are pale
i am sleeping you are dead
we’re all playing cards as the ship goes down
we’re living as if we are not, hanging from a precipice
shuddering and lurching off the edge
but someday this will all be gone, as fast a match can be struck
take warning for the veil is very thin

3. DEAR DARKNESS | pj harvey
the words are tightening around my throat
and around the throat of the one i love

4. HEY SON | nancy elizabeth
hey son
it's a hard life

5. THE UNHOLY | rose kemp
call me young and foolish and reckless
because that's what i am

6. EVANGELINE | siren on
evangeline
do you know how beautiful you are
holding stars in your hands
as you silently let them go into the night

7. CROWN OF LOVE | arcade fire
if you still want me, please forgive me
the crown of love has fallen from me

your name is the only word that i can say

8. AN APPEAL TO ST PETER | pale young gentlemen
it's not a broken heart that i'm reeling from
i beg for absolution

and i try so hard to play the part

9. THE CLOCKWISE WITNESS | devotchka
in this moment of atonement
can you ever forgive me?
is there something hovering?
it seems to be governing
everything once dear to me

10. THICKETS | patrick wolf
oh what have i become?

11. KEEP ME ON | bodies of water
keep me on, hold me on the narrow way
and the sting of the nettle's barb allay
keep a hedge round me till the other side
deep and wide

12. THE WALTZ | dandelion junk queens
hold me close and you will see
just how much you mean to me

13. ALL THE THINGS | dark dark dark
if it all washed away
what would you hold onto of everything?
(oh, all the songs you've ever known
oh, all the stories ever told)

14. TAM LIN | mediaeval baebes
and at the end of seven years
we pay a tiend to hell
i am sae fair and fu' o' flesh
i'm feared it be myself

15. BROTHER OF SLEEP | soap&skin
i dreamed of you
every day
and every night