Brian Harnetty & Bonnie "Prince" Billy
Silent City

THE REVIEW

Trains slowly suck you in. Their rhythms, their waits, their landscapes slid by a dirty window. Sleep, laziness. Autumn fading away in the gray sky, amidst gusts of cold wind. A desire for warmth and solitude. Lulling oneself into life...

The silence of a city around six in the evening; a few cars glide over their sector of gray; fumes, scraps of paper. Lights on behind opaque glass. In the bar, overheated, you listen to a man and a woman by your side talking; you don't even try to understand what happened before the words you hear, nor are you much interested in what comes after.

And then home, in silence, without even turning on the kitchen light.

The street lights, the night that peeks out from the garages, from under the trees, from under the bridges. Chatter. A strange calm, almost as if everyone were falling asleep or had just woken up.

A rhythm that is not a rhythm but hypnosis. A voice always on the verge of bursting into tears. Sounds like pillows of fog. Music boxes, childhood memories, autumns. Music rising slowly, lingering in mid-air. Intangible.

Photos of people who died before you were born. A book you've been meaning to finish for months and that always moves, anyway, too slowly...

A low vibration, wrapping around itself, illuminated by the colors of the street lights. A sense of arrival, perhaps resignation. Thoughts retreating to bars, with eyes fixed on cups of hot tea. Winter drowsiness, soaking rain, wet paper scraps. Constantly waiting, for the train to arrive, for someone to arrive, for something important to arrive.

...

Thousands of men passing under the descending evening. Over their houses, over their empty closets, on the sidewalks where they walk. Millions of men returning home, in silence, in the darkness of this sweet and vaporous autumn. Men in black and white, with measured steps, eyes almost drained of intentions. Tired. Thousands of men sitting on dark, heavy sofas.

The light here, in this record, is nothing but an illuminated shadow.