Well, if you thought that this might be me branching out to another new artist....no, more than anything, The Keene Brothers is more of a Guided By Voices offshoot, with Robert Pollard teaming up with Tommy Keene for a really excellent album. Keene's talent for power pop really brings out the best in Pollard (and seemingly the other way around too, though I don't know Keene so well). It particularly shines in the gorgeous ballad "Death of the Party" and this song, "Lost Upon Us":
The chiming guitars, the lovely melodies, yeah it's right up my musical alley.
Lyrically the song is also interesting, although like most Pollard creations it is difficult to say exactly what the song is means, but it is possible to gesture towards the senses of meaningfulness that is creates. To explore some of its mysteries, for one, it is not entirely clear to me why Pollard adopted the phrasing "lost upon us." Usually we say that something is "lost on us," for instance, if there is something I don't understand or appreciate then I might say that it was "lost on me." There is generally little semantic difference between "on" and "upon," it just happens that some words typically pair with one or the other. "Lost" typically pairs with "on," but it may just be that Pollard liked the rhythm of the extra syllable better.
But accompanying this is the ambiguity of the phrase itself: is it good or bad that these things are "lost upon us." The first lines of the song are very ambiguous in this regard:
In the holier trials, yes,
Lost upon us
Stare down your throat
Into the dust
[Chorus:] Barely bleeding
From scratching and screaming
And all is immersed in perfection and cursed
Just to save you
What are the "holier trials?" I am guessing they are the times when we are tested in the course of pursuing some kind of higher purpose, and the things that are lost upon us, that ultimately do not trouble us, are the obstacles that we must surmount: I'm "barely bleeding" from the scratching and screaming involved in saving someone, and don't even notice it, perhaps? Or perhaps it is the "you" who is doing the scratching and screaming, it's hard to say. Clearly the situation is both desperate but also about transcending that. The fact that this struggle is what the chorus is about suggests that it is also the main thing lost upon us in the song.
In that case, it's probably a good thing that those bad things don't fully register. But the second to last line of this chorus, has its own ambiguity that needs some unpacking. Does it read
And all is immersed in perfection and cursed
or,
And all is immersed in perfection and curse
I'm not sure how much difference it ultimately makes to the song, but in the first one, the "cursed" at the end signals a potentially causal relationship. By being "immersed in perfection" things are "cursed." This suggests that perfection is ultimately corrosive and distorting, likely because, when things are immersed in perfection, their distance from it, their inability to live up to its standards, makes them seem all the worse (and unfairly so). This is, in other words, the idea that the "perfect is the enemy of the good." What is less clear is how this helps, how it is all "just to save you," as the final line of the chorus puts it. Is the "you" of the song being idolized here, everything is immersed in the perfection of you and thus cursed in comparison?
Or is it that all of the prior struggle (in this "holier trial") is immersed in perfection, that is, it is viewed from the perspective of completion, and cursed perhaps in the sense of being denigrated as falling short of that or of standing in that way of it? It is hard to say, and the second reading actually seems a little clearer in this regard. My thought is that perfection and curse are both terms of judgment, and if those are the terms that you use to judge everything, then perhaps you are bound to fall on the side of perfection since the alternative is so extreme. Or perhaps everything is immersed in them insofar as it is exposed to the extremes of experience, the extremely good and bad, and they must be undergone.
Not surprisingly for a Pollard song, I don't have an airtight interpretation for all of this, but at least in exploring them we get a sense of the emotional stakes in general. It also lets me look at one of the nicer turns of phrase that occurs in the song later:
And the flimsier fences
Built against us
Born within us
When love is not
Lost upon us
The first three lines are fairly straightforward: Pollard is singing about the kinds of internal walls that keep us apart and keep us down. They are ones that are sometimes imposed on us by the world ("built against us"), and sometimes we do it to ourselves ("born within us"). But what is interesting are the two possibilities for how the final two lines can be read. Just by reading the lyrics it seems as though these fences are erected "When love is not lost upon us," but this seems like a strange thing to say. Do we get tangled in all of these things when we engage with love, when it doesn't pass us by? Its unusual for a rock and roll song to deny the saving power love altogether (outside of a heartbreak song of course, but this doesn't seem like that).
Instead, I think the song (and Pollard's vocals) treat the break between "When love is not" and "Lost upon us" seriously. Those fences come into being "when love is not," i.e., when it is absent, and for us, who have undergone the holier trials, who have suffered together and stayed together, we who love, all of those fences are lost upon us. Love allows us to pay them no mind. Immersed in perfection, we curse them and cast them aside.
Finally, I can get to my favourite lines in the song:
As the outspoken terms
Are tethered and blocked off
They keep all you have learned
As an osmotic toss-off
Being lost upon us
The big question here is who "they" are: I think they refer to the "outspoken terms," which suggests that the process is one of the struggle to express/establish oneself which runs into the same kinds of barriers as mentioned earlier (the "flimsier fences" tether and block them). I'm not sure if the terms are words of expression, or terms as conditions of proceeding (here made explicit), but they reflect what has been overcome, even if they themselves are blocked off.
But even those restricted terms retain the lessons learned
