Musical Catharsis

Pain sunk its teeth into me like a rabid dog. It leaked out of me like crude oil, marring everything. Corrosive and excoriating. Napalm on virgin forest. A thousand incendiary bombs. Roaring unhappiness metastasizing like a malignant tumour. A haemorrhaging blood vessel. It was an anguish against which I had not been inoculated, and one that I was feebly trying to understand. I was 19, addled and aching. This was one of those contemptibly soppy adolescent moments, in which everything feels grand and towering and electrifying and consequential; every syllable of conversation imbued with cosmic importance. At some ungodly hour of the night, assailed by adolescent melancholia and emotional aches, my friend Joe tenderly pulled me into his chest. Scruffy puffs of jet black hair tumbled artfully over his face. Strawberry blushes shyly crept onto my cheeks as he held me. Two souls tethered for a moment. Two humble terrestrial creatures unified against the fickle and capricious world. His embrace mellowed me. Hot tears rippled down my plump porcelain cheeks like the tributaries of a river. He held me. The inky harbour sighed below us. We were stationary in his car at a charming Sydney spot. His soulful bambi eyes looked wistfully into the inky jet black of the night, and the sticky, salty wind licked my cheeks like a giddy Labrador. Joe was singularly kind, wide-grinned and supremely gentle. It was at this moment of emotional weariness and emotional maelstrom – the apogee of my stress – that I first listened to Go Farther in Lightness. The music that complimented this moment could not have more apt if it had been curated for a soppy Richard Linklater film. Go Farther in Lightness is an achingly beautiful and affecting album by Gang of Youths. It is an album punctuated by moments of bleeding sadness, roaring excitement and unfettered glee. It is a masterful rendering of the vicissitudes of life, in all its turbulence and swooning pleasures. The prevailing themes of love, lust, estrangement, intimacy and tumult are artfully and deftly weaved into this album. Cascading, thumping, dizzying emotion prevails. It is musical alchemy, a stirring album that is indelibly impressed into my mind. Go Farther in Lightness still hits me like a freight train, even though I am not a blubbering nineteen year-old anymore. It conveys me back to the intimate moment I shared with my friend. It reminds me of the fiery love I felt for him, and of music’s capacity to ameliorate pain, to mellow and to illuminate. It’s enrapturing, and continues to buoy me at times of head-spinning stress. The lurid cameo I presented was intended to elucidate why this album is meaningful to me, and how music can connect us to our emotions and transmute them into something beautiful and artful. Go Farther in Lightness is not mellow or especially sunny and cheerful. In fact, much of the album howls with sadness. In my humble view, its therapeutic value is in its sobering and, ultimately, life-affirming rendering of raw human experience. Elegiac and wistful moments of fiery emotion are bookended by crescendos of sublime and soaring pleasure and enchanting beauty. It provides a sort of musical catharsis by connecting the listener to his suffering, and then transmuting it into something supremely beautiful. For the hot-blooded, brooding twenty-something person, this album is a deliverance from the pacey, wearying and cluttered world. For the jaded and dispirited – for waning spirits - it is a not-so-gentle but frank and firm reminder that life is messy and turbulent, and an injunction to live it more wholeheartedly. It is energising and soulful, and the perfect companion for musing.