1. |
Leader of The Free World
05:45
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Firearms, biblically, apply to criminality
We just need good guys with better guns
We’re GOP gentlemen
And I’m phenomenal with women
Children are my self-esteem
Make America Great Again
A great US armed to the teeth
Unborn American Dream
We build a school, we build a road
They blow up the school we build again
They blow it up, we build again
And we can't get a fucking school in Brooklyn
I’m the Leader of the Free World
So, Free World, you’d better watch out for me
All the negative polls are fake news, fake news
CNN and ABC in my election
People want security and vicious, brutal border vetting
A credible source has called my office.
Told me that the birth’s a fraud
I never "mocked" that cripple
Never grinned and flapped at all
Never said I grabbed a pussy
Women are a free-for-all
Really had coronavirus
Never told a lie at all
It’s a scary time for men here in America
Women are doing great
Deny, deny, deny and push back on these women
If I get my way we’ll have the backing of the state
There should be penance for abortion
There has to be some form of punishment.
For the woman, not the man…
After all he’s just the management
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2. |
The Tardigrade Song
03:58
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To the eye he’s the offspring of a hoover bag
And a pig and a cartoon ghost
A bilaterally symmetrical and octopedic sight gag
Just a millimetre at the most
He swaggers on the moon and dances round your front room
Inconsequential if it’s afternoon or night
And to lethal radiation he’s genetically immune
Transmutates it into harmless blue light
If he gets dessicated by the merciless old sun
And there nothing but a morsel of him there
He’ll be suspended as an entity he likes to call a tun
Suspended for years in the air
Some call him the mighty moss or water bear
Lazzaro Spallanzani said he walked so slow
But in the microscopic lichen-world in which he’s governor
He’s the forte and the pianissimo
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3. |
Remembered Voices
03:52
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How the hell did it get so late so soon
You hoped to see things that would dazzle and entrance you
Wanted to feel what you never ever felt before
Meant to understand a different point of view
But if you haven’t yet
I trust and pray that, then
You have the heart to start all over again
Your time is the longest distance between two places
All trapped in the amber of the moment and the faces
Yesterday is gone
Tomorrow yet to come
Right now we have today
Yes? Well let us begin
And all the while delay and meet
Of times there were before
You listen for returning feet
Remembered voices at your door
How the hell did it get so late so soon
You hoped to see things that would dazzle and entrance you
Wanted to feel what you never ever felt before
Meant to understand a different point of view
But if you haven’t yet
I trust and pray that, then
You have the heart to start all over again
You lie among rare dragonflies
In a landscape made of twilit skies
And tender ghosts of human lives
Sense of one-ness
Sun and Stone and Life
You don’t yet shine with glory
But all is being
Our time is the distance between two vast spaces
All trapped in the amber of the moment and embraces
Yesterday is gone.
Tomorrow yet to be
Right now we have today
Yes? Well let us see
And all the while delay and meet
Of times there were before
You listen for returning feet
Remembered voices at your door
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4. |
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She was married in June with her youth all ablaze
Every last woman cried
And the men misbehaved
Her sweet head was bowed as she swept through the nave
With her groom who was handsome and fine
With her groom who was graceful and fine
In her hair were fresh sweet-peas and dill and green sages
Delphiniums, roses and lilies
The thoughts in her head were churning ambages
As she visioned her nuptial night
Her seductive voluptuous night
So back into the bright went the bride and her sword
She took off a stocking
She cast it abroad.
That the maidens might capture the three-stranded cord
And enamour a match of their own
Beguile a young man of their own
Her honeymoon night flowed with syrup and blessings
Her breath warm and quick with her husband’s caresses
Her man arched his back. As she savoured her pleasure
And the moon watched disdainful above
For the moon’s eyes are blinded to love
Two eternities met
The past and the future
A moment’s delight
And the children came soon
A merry today and a joyful tomorrow
And the sun saw the time they had borrowed
For the sun is unmindful to sorrow
The seasons crept past with insouciant ease
Our bride and her groom, and the must of their seed
The moss and the lichen continued to grow
And the leaves of the trees all ashow
And the roots of the trees there below
And the lilies she wore long ago
The tide of their lives, like the tides of the sea
Moon-driven and flooding their harbour, their quay
Rose slyly around them, their time and their days
Spun around them until they were gone
Time drowned them until they were done
Time inveigled them until there was none
She was married in June with her youth all ablaze
Every last woman cried
And the men misbehaved
Fleeting moments have passed, she’s been years in her grave
With her man and her children aside
And her children’s poor children besides
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5. |
Dulle Griet
05:00
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Dulle Griet she doesn’t hurry
Winnow, drudgery or scullery
She rises in the night and cocks a snook at the monotony
No workaday mundanity. No humdrum domesticity
Dulle Griet is on an odyssey to hell…
Dulle Griet she says
“The filthy bones of your bones are not mine
Nor the flesh-of-your-flesh
Blood of your blood time of your time
My Mother’s ribs are trees and seas and earth no less
And hers and mine are more than you could possibly possess.”
Bekka… the above WILL scan okay, please listen to the version I sent the other night. x
Dulle Griet she journeys down to Hell with sword and broom and skillet
Fiends are spilling from the gate. She seizes one and kills it
The dagger hanging from her hem is rosy ruby red
Trouting for the fallen one
She’s scouting for the crawling one…
Dulle Griet she pins the helpless Devil to a pillow
He’s down here in Hell with all his demons, pucks and all his peccadillos
With his boatmen in a cauldron and his harp beshattered egg
The burning skies and vacant eyes. The army of the dead
Dulle Griet she says:
“My apron overflows with Satan’s tears
And his cum and blood and terror and his black and rotten prayers.
My apron overflows with bullish masculine espousing
Virility, stupidity, and strutting and arousing.
They call me mad to seek this Satan through the leery mouth of Hell
With its gaze of condescension and its fetid personnel
I came to force the Devil here to think and think again
And remember that all women are commensurate to men
My broom and sword are ready. And I’m adequately pissed
To set my sights on Paradise
Because God’s next on my list”
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6. |
Stillness
05:39
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I’m so empty, hot and unreal
The way a coming hurricane must feel
I move so fast to stay so very still
What could be easier to do
In the middle of this hullabaloo
I’m so willing to be calm
To be becalmed
What can be easier
I move so fast to stay so very still
What could be easier to do
In the middle of this hullabaloo
I hold my pillow to my heart
It’s so quiet
When the dogs die
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7. |
Mary's Ale
04:12
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That was this man abroad this day
And he must needs to go forth to play.
And as he walked, he sighed and said
''I am afeared to die unbedded”
When that be said a maid, she heard
And she was glad and did not spare to say
''Fair sir, you must not quail,
For I shall give you Mary’s Ale.”
Love is baryon torchsong heavy
Like a predawn plainsong crafted in the fleshy
Sweating burrows in the hollows
Of the places in the furrows
Where the scent is primal
A trick for our survival
Who cares it’s a sin, it’s a win, our skin
Holds such treasures for our pleasure
The moist that is without, within
The eyes from which it emanates
The unsaid love that resonates
The glamour is strong and the musk is stronger
And sinuous filaments of ecstasy grow longer
The webs and our gyration
The fingers of flirtation
Don’t bring the orchestra into this thing
Here I am worshipping
The sordid beginning of everything
She took this gentleman aside
And led him where he was not spied
And told him many a pretty tale
And she gave him well of Mary’s Ale
The carapace we have is just a cell, a hole, a pen
For the hot and wet fecundity we have to hold within
A burning, yearning scented heart
A furnace we can tear apart
For the chambers of vulgarity suppressed and disavowed
Are the nature of our creature-selves of which we should be proud
“'Tis sweeter far than sugar fine
And pleasanter than Muscadine.
And if you please fair blade to stay
A little while to sport and play
I will give you the same,
And Mary’s Ale it’s called by name”
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8. |
One Skin for Another
03:28
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There’s a glamorous magnificence of time recalled.
The oceans and the skies and firmament.
Remember life in moments or remember not at all.
This is your life.
You get to choose how well it will be spent.
And the time is fleeting.
The net of time’s a construct into which we all will fall.
Don’t concern yourselves with that idea of death, forever sleeping.
You’re only substituting one skin for another after all.
Can you see the subtle glow? The ticking of the distant clock?
The farthest and the deepest, gravest jewel.
If you’re patient you will hear the tick and then the final tock.
And rejoice in beatific, unavoidable renewal.
Life compensates in love what it lacks in length and span.
You aren’t a pawn or puppet in some idol’s master plan.
Your radiant vibrations aren’t suspended at the last.
You occupy the present and the future and the past.
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9. |
The Song of Just Because
04:33
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I hear the blood’s been beating hard behind your eyes again
And I understand that you’ve been poisoning yourself to sleep again
Escaping from the light
And shadows
Suffocating in your clothes
You don’t want poetry
And you don’t need god
There must be something here to hang yourself upon
Escaping from the light
And shadows
And falling into night
All this nostalgia
For what never was
Conjuring the dream of just because
If there were your old sad soul’s reality
If you were one with the world
Perhaps a bold bird would sing brightly
If you were one with the world
Through the tears and through the landscape
Eternal sunset of your life
A nostalgia for what never was
And this premise is so strange besides
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10. |
O Happy Day
04:33
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So there’s no pleasure in the mundane world
So dark and dull and dead it has no promises to hold
The drabness and discouragement… the endless quest for nourishment
All waiting in our uniforms… stupid, grey and cruciform
Because one touch of man makes all the world a hell in human form
When commerce unfulfills us
When the tension builds up
When industry kills us
Then we have nothing
No loving
It’s all crushing
We’re born to fly but we’ve betrayed our wings
And the one who dies the richest
Wins
Perhaps imagination of the beauty of creation
The net of life and time
A mesmerizing inspiration
The web of our existence… the labyrinth of instances
A trail through all our lives that is the path of least resistance
Hear the million hearts that beat within the sweet and warming earth
The endless verdant spiral that is love and death and birth
The alchemy and majesty
The richness of the deep blue sea
The glory of the soaring sky
A glimpse of all that mystifies
Because one touch of nature makes the world entire personified
When the earth moves us
When the rain falls on us
When the great sun smiles on us
When the moon, the moon, the moon she shines on us
Then we have everything
We can conquer anything
Remember
We’re okay
O! Happy Day
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11. |
Leaf
05:08
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Now it is the end of July,
The corkscrew hazel leaves are broad
Succulent on their monkeypuzzled twigs.
The bower is a shady, sea-green cloud
And the dogwoods are in full and mighty bloom,
Revelling in their pink flowers.
We approach these trees and touch,
And we feel living warmth
And Tiny fires
Ruinous. Unstoppable.
After 90 million miles
We examine a leaf as it basks
It is flat and broad… the naive shape
Of a child’s drawing of a leaf
The edge appears smooth,
But, closer to…
It is finely toothed.
A tiny, delicate saw
The teeth curl. Blacken. Disintegrate and collapse.
Fragments of dust become nothing in the bright, hot dark
As time marches on
Growing darkness will trigger a cellular elongation within the leaf’s abscission layer.
Burning red and orange carotenoids, the trees’ technicolour bequest,
Will blaze for a few weeks.
The sun will become a pale, white marble in the sky.
Autumn will have its way with us all.
And then, perhaps in late October, a breeze
Will cause our leaf to tumble to the soil.
And as the human world becomes a furnace
A torrent
A hurricane
A desert
And by the long-dead remembrance of Christmas, it will be gone.
With us
Just more dirt on the ground.
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Paul Devine England, UK
1983: Sheffield, singing with Siiiii
1986: Leaves band
1989: South Wales
1993: DVO form
2005: Siiiii
reform. Release Ancient
2006: Siiiii active live. Play New York
2008: Ein Verdammtes Versprechen released
2008: A Murder of Sandfleas released
2014: Modern. Paul leaves band again
2019: Diagnosed with ADHD, BPD and Tourette’s
2021 – 2022: Publishes four books
2023: The Compass Rose released
... more
Paul Devine recommends:
Education or Catastrophe
by Fauxchisels
Paul Broome is, frankly, a genius.
go to album
Complete Discography
by 13th Chime
This lot were a huge part of my musical education, and the best (only?) great post-punk band to come out of Suffolk.
go to album
Prayers on Fire
by The Birthday Party
Still makes everything else sound just a little stale... forty-two years later!
go to albumIf you like Paul Devine, you may also like:
Multimedia artist Sepehr Mashiahof uses dark and direct synth-pop vocabulary to create her own intricate narrative of identity.
go to album
“Strangers” is packed with wonderfully menacing electro-goth—late-night horror movie music for vampire dance parties.
go to album
This Is The Healing (Remastered)
by L.S.Underground
An early ’90s cult classic of goth/dark folk gets a vinyl reissue, its haunting songs as gripping and resonant as ever.
go to album
