“Here Lies” by Hidden Hospitals, Thursday, June 23, 2022
Your writing teacher probably told you to "avoid clichés like the plague." Writers and content creators constantly have to draw attention to their work, and anything trite or overtly formulaic might give the reader, viewer, listener, etc. that you as an artist don't care enough about your subject to make it fresh. The truth is, you graduate from high school or college, you write informally and you write a lot, you tend to start developing plague-like symptoms. You start working in an office, and everyone's listening to light rock. The music in your 30s is different from the cool and edgy music of your 20s, and all you want to do is to listen to something that won't make you think too much. Something that uses way too many clichés. But then, every once in a while a new group will come along to distract you from that monotony, even if their lyrics are basically turning clichés on their head.
SAID THE RIGHT WORDS, PLAYED THE WRONG CHORDS. With nary a song over 4:30, Hidden Hospitals is a unique progressive hard rock band. As I noted with "Typecast," last year, the band has a tendency to write addictive song structures that seem to end too quickly, leaving the listener wanting more. Like many rock groups, their lyrics can be easily missed on first listens, but listeners start to notice fragments of the song's main idea and the use of clichés juxtaposed with a strange image or comparison raises more curiosity into the song's meaning. Unfortunately, with 2020's release of Headstones, a four-song EP following up their 2018 record Liars, streaming platforms didn't include the lyrics nor were they published on the major lyrics publishing websites. Unable to find the lyrics, I decided to try to transcribe them, which is difficult under normal circumstances, but with "Here Lies," the distorted guitars covering lead singer David Raymond's often unclear voice, along with the the overdubs on the second verse, I was quite unsure of the actual lyrics. But then I found that the band had published their lyrics on their Soundcloud page.
A BLINDED SONGBIRD SCARED OF HEIGHTS. "Here Lies" is the second track on Headstones and is the song that references the title in the chorus. Raymonds sings: "I'd bury all the headstones." I've been wrestling with the meaning of this song all day, like a good song should make you think; however, without much writing or online interpretation of this band or their songs, it was hard to connect it autobiographical details that the song could be about. In other words, I was on my own. Many of Hidden Hospitals' songs are clever and have a dark sarcasm to them. "Here Lies" uses funeral imagery which is consistent with the rest of the EP in tone. Several questions come up when it comes to the chorus. First, why does the speaker want to bury "Here lies"? And second, why does he "want to bury the headstones"? Why bury a phrase? Stop using it? Is it against death? Or is the phrase a person who died or is dead to him? What if "Here lies" was a disguise for "Her lies," meaning a friend or lover or even a boss who the speaker wishes were dead to him? Whatever the meaning, there's always something interesting to glean from a listen to Hidden Hospitals.
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