Ethere is only you and me, both of us; a third party does not fit in. A man and a woman can fall in love – we were always meant to be together and we just didn’t know it all along – or break up. Both situations are life changing and call for poetry and song. It is love that inspires the song. Not only the beginning, but also the ending.
The first form is the older; It was only late that people found poetics of farewell, of the obituary of a love, of the desire for melancholy. Romanticism discovered pain in Müller/Schubert’s “Winterreise”: “The girl spoke of love, the mother even of marriage, – / Now the world is so gloomy, the path is covered in snow.” But this mourning should no longer be, the mothers have not spoken of the “marriage” for a long time. And so new songs are emerging, designed to cover up the grief, because it won’t go away on its own.
Only I was empty as a drum
Romanticism did not yet know this form. It has only existed since one learned (or claims to have learned) to realistically endure that things as big as stars can have their time. Then the song has to assert itself in a biographical crisis. There is a whole genre of such songs, the farewell attack, the “kiss off”, the “go for it” and the “it’s over”: From Bob Dylan’s “It’s all over now, baby blue”, “Don’t think twice”, “It ain’t me babe” to “Go your own way” by Fleetwood Mac. You break free. You want – right now! – be the actor, not the sufferer. One asserts a sovereignty where perhaps one would rather collapse. One invents songs of revenge.
The song “Weights and Measures” fans out the entire spectrum of such moods. She made her decision, not him (or so he claims): “You’ve made your decision”. And now get lost. The feeling? Like the old stab that the woodcutter’s momentum inflicts on the tree. I fall on my knees and elbows in the forest, silently because nobody is looking. And now he, the innocent little lamb, blames her: he was ready for love and also wanted to completely refrain from expectations. The ghost has left you, baby, hasn’t it? Don’t lie to yourself. Listen to the old records again and admit that the spirit has gone elsewhere.
After all, we are the animals in which becoming guilty is part of nature. But that doesn’t mean you have to wear it again. In the end, it’s about necessary needs and not about the beads of a rosary: The almost religious highness of first love is despicable and subject to “needs”. Silent restraint has no patron saint. And, baby, our thing has nothing to do with the sword in the lake (Excalibur, from Arthurian legend, being held by a woman, the “lady of the lake”) but more with a wake. You were the coldest star in the sky, only I couldn’t see it: I was blind. The black night is falling (the depression), it’s been calling your name since you were born, only I didn’t hear it, was empty as a drum. Then a few lines are repeated to close again with the wake for a broken love.
Well exploited ecstasy potential
Not an overly esoteric text, one might say; the proportion of standing idioms in English is large. Just as the band’s initially enigmatic-sounding name – “Dry The River” – has nothing to do with river beds drying up in the face of the climate crisis; in the region of origin of its members, in the south-west of England, it means something like: Now let’s have a drink. Unfortunately, the group no longer exists, it existed from 2009 to 2015. The last Twitter entry from their account dates from April 2019. Peter Liddle, the singer and actual initiator, had made realistic statements early on about the prospects of music to be able to live. When asked where he saw himself in five years, he replied in the magazine “Interview” in 2012 that it was quite possible that they would all return to their jobs.
There is an “Official Video” of the song “Weights and Measures” (another such idiom: units and weights) in which “she” defends herself with a chainsaw, alluding to the lumberjack, the “woodcutter”. In the end, they face each other in silence. There is also a live version on a boat, with acoustic guitars only. Then a remarkable video of the performance “Live at Bush hall”. This is where the full potential of the song becomes clear: It starts out softly, but then, at the line “The spirit has left you, baby”, the song is energized, the electricity mills its way into it with all its might and shows what is energetically in is in the song.
The massive crescendo is almost a hallmark of the band. The tender, lyrical live version with the Swedish singer Feivel is completely different, you can easily find others. A process of constant revision of the song becomes clear, which is difficult to pin down in one direction. It’s more of a swing between the restrained folk and the volume, whose potential for ecstasy is well exploited. The reason: The musicians of “Dry The River” had an unusual path behind them, they all came from the metal and punk world to folk, their development is reflected in the heart of the song. Peter Liddle explained that he just got tired of screaming one day.
The change in style brought about the head voice singing that sometimes makes this band sound as pure as a boys’ choir, in delightful contrast to the raggedy stuff. Harmonically, the song is not particularly complicated, but its simplicity is beautifully adapted to the soul that is being sung.
