Tracks
Fog: "Your Beef Is Mine"
(2007)
By Alan Baban | 31 January 2008
There are some pretty powerful indicators why you should stop reading this and just ignore "Your Beef Is Mine." Outward descriptors of the song can't miss that it's a) long and dramatic, b) faintly hokey and c) too serious to give a shit. There are no more Arcade Fire-sized holes to fill on this planet; my pain and sadness is more sad and painful than ever. But, see, this is the type of context-involuting ambiguity that Fog's Andrew Broder works magic in: much of his group's formidable Ditherer operates on abstract juxtapositions reigned in by contrapuntal brute force. Songs like "Inflatable Ape Pt. 3" and "On the Gallows" perpetuate and persist in the black face of exploding tangents and cavernous silences. The narrator of "The Last I Knew Of You," for example, is in a doomed race to individualise and outlast his own replications before his TV slips the plague.
This sense of familiar identity, both claustrophobic and open, is explored further in "Beef," the apotheosis and ultimatum of Fog's oeuvre to date. Despite the deliberate songwriting and exacting arrangements, the dream-logic of the lyrics, and any number of other things that could potentially wreck the sense of pregnant contemplation Broder creates so well in his opening vignette ("A three-piece suit on me / A tutu on you / In an empty airplane hangar / At a table for two"), the band swoops in right at the hesitant moment of despair ("Spare me the details") to instil the thing with lived-in warmth. From that moment on, the song isn't so much tentatively thought-through as it is occupied and asserted, relished with burgeoning humanity and left to inspire itself in the muck. The concluding segue comes on as an evolutionary lurch, coruscating guitars reaching fever pitch as Broder lays it on thickest: "If you ever were somewhere where you never were / Inside someone else's skin / Stealing someone's self from them / We're in this together -- you're beef is mine." What separates it from the stadium-sized epiphanies of (say) "No Cars Go" is what also gives it a sense of true heroism: the band don't so much commit the insight to art as live it outright. Guitars and stuff just happened to be in the vicinity.
This sense of familiar identity, both claustrophobic and open, is explored further in "Beef," the apotheosis and ultimatum of Fog's oeuvre to date. Despite the deliberate songwriting and exacting arrangements, the dream-logic of the lyrics, and any number of other things that could potentially wreck the sense of pregnant contemplation Broder creates so well in his opening vignette ("A three-piece suit on me / A tutu on you / In an empty airplane hangar / At a table for two"), the band swoops in right at the hesitant moment of despair ("Spare me the details") to instil the thing with lived-in warmth. From that moment on, the song isn't so much tentatively thought-through as it is occupied and asserted, relished with burgeoning humanity and left to inspire itself in the muck. The concluding segue comes on as an evolutionary lurch, coruscating guitars reaching fever pitch as Broder lays it on thickest: "If you ever were somewhere where you never were / Inside someone else's skin / Stealing someone's self from them / We're in this together -- you're beef is mine." What separates it from the stadium-sized epiphanies of (say) "No Cars Go" is what also gives it a sense of true heroism: the band don't so much commit the insight to art as live it outright. Guitars and stuff just happened to be in the vicinity.