Your Silent Face by New Order

That god damn synthesizer does it for me every time. I don't know if I was really conscious of how much I loved Your Silent Face by New Order until two weeks ago when I went to watch The Goldfinch, which features the song in its soundtrack — and which also happens to have been the sixth-lowest-earning-film to open on 2500 screens in cinematic history — but I was sitting there in my chair and the beat started and I immediately Shazammed it, was like, oh it's New Order, and got told off by the elderly woman sitting next to me for distracting her with the light from my screen. My bad. For the record the movie was long and unwieldy and difficult to appreciate especially seeing as I was such a fan of the book, but if you haven't read the book you might like it. Hard to say.

But anyway, walking around the city like a loner listening to melancholic music is one of my favorite pastimes, and sitting in airports listening to sad songs is a lifelong obsession, and over the past two weeks I spent a disproportionate amount of time walking around alone and then I flew to Paris and back, so Your Silent Face got played approximately 87 times in 14 days. This is not an exaggeration.

I don't really know what the song is about, but the instrumentation is moody and the lyrics are delivered in such a sardonic, deadpan way that it kind of reminds me of a musical answer to Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis, and I was listening to Novacane by Frank Ocean a lot at the same time and there seems to be a stylistic correlation there too. Something about not very nice things presented without any form of judgement or malice.

"You've caught me at a bad time, so why don't you piss off."

I was listening to it while driving to Charles de Gaulle to fly back to New York yesterday and I snapped this photo:

I LIKE YOU!