Untitled

oneweekoneband:

The World/Inferno Friendship Society - So Long To The Circus 

Final track from ”Red-Eyed Soul” (2006)

sometimes I miss the circus, I know why I ran away
I stepped right out of that song while it played
I lit it like a stage and I gave it like a gift
and what I got out of it is this

Self-descrbed circus punk group the World/Inferno Friendship Society’s Red-Eyed Soul is populated with merry thieves and imaginary lawyers, pretty anarchists and younger men. There are odes to brave men who lived their lives just as they would have it and tales of fighting the good fight and escaping bar fights. It’s a record that observes joy beats oppression but oppression will make you pay, fifteen tracks at the shifting but ever-dizzying velocity of love that careen past art-school graffiti and nights that are never too long with an exuberance that somehow remains untempered by the awareness that you get hit pretty hard going so damn fast. It’s a breakneck tour of a trickster’s world, and “So Long To The Circus” is its inevitable conclusion.

be suspicious but friendly to your elders
be friendly but suspicious to other circuses
trust your friends even if you can’t trust your friends
you’ve already agreed to travel with them

It is a storm of a song, brewing from those first naked spasms of the electric guitar, thunderclaps that prefigure rain; warning shots, by another framing. There is a build (ominous swirls of wind) as the bass and drums begin the propulsive duet that provides the through line for most of the song, then a plateau when the guitar drops out to make room for Jack Terricloth’s murmur, low enough that hints of gravel tarnish its characteristic smoothness. He often feels less a frontman than a raconteur, and so this begins another story of passion, calamity, and near escapes. Horns step in to fill out the sound (the first cold drops) and quickly retreat to let him dispense wisdom the muted bite in his voice points to as being hard-earned. Underneath his advice, the guitars begin crackling back to life (bolts of lightning), hinting at something more explosive to come, until the piano’s descending glide (clouds breaking open) shoves us into the first chorus.

so long to the circus, so long to it all
I’ve always had a good sense when it’s time to get gone
when the police are about to arrive, when security steps in
wave goodbye to the circus

This is a song about goodbyes, necessary and unwelcome. It’s a song about losing innocence you didn’t know you still had. Nothing in it is an ode to what transpired, but by looking at the debris you can imagine aspects of what it must have been like. The splendor, the wonder. The wondering. The pain and the sweetness, too. The confusion and terror and thrill. It was a circus: beautiful and frightening, so much more than a single relationship — a world. A place you belonged that belonged to you. A place where you grew up, some. A chapter of your life, and this song is the act of turning the page.

sometimes I miss the circus and the friends I made
I never would have left had you stayed
you left us like a stage that you’d outgrown
leaving me stunned and all alone

It was so much more than a relationship, but it was that, too, a world and the person at its center. The piano wanders prettily above the churn of the other instruments, off-setting the new harshness in Jack’s voice. Where we had a scene now we have history: I never would have left had you stayed, confession and accusation and futile plea. This song exists at the precise epicenter of heartbreak, where rage is at once a shield for grief and utterly sincere, where it is equally true that you will never forgive them and that you would forget everything if only they would return. Come back/fuck you/come back, come back, come back. It needed to end. How could you end it. Fuck you.

say goodbye to the circus
and don’t cry
it was just another circus
it was just your first time
didn’t know what you were doing
couldn’t know what you missed
what did you get out of this

Who is he talking to in this spiteful elegy, shouting over the skeletal accompaniment of drums and guitars: the one who left him all alone, or the version of himself that could still be stunned by such betrayal? Just another circus/just your first time: nothing special, no reason to be so upset, except that it changed your life, that’s all. It wasn’t anything, it was just too much for you. Move along, nothing to see here. But it’s an incomplete renunciation: there’s too much hurt here. The band’s melee kicks back in for this ruthless depiction of the brutality of romance:

that love is real, unstoppable
actually a wild animal
self-interested, amorally cruel
and you got between it and food…

There isn’t anything more to be said after that. There’s the female harmonies that wrench the song even closer to the edges; there’s the falsetto sigh into which Jack disappears for the last word; there’s the constriction into a sputtering guitar, and the explosion into the final chorus; there’s the winding down, the rain dwindling, the sky clearing, the storm leaving the world wretchedly and mercifully empty; but those are extraneous now that the story has revealed itself. It was an immersion and an escape not yet achieved. It was love and its vicious aftermath. It was, at one point, everything. It was sound and fury. A tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing. 

It’s time to get gone. There’s nothing left to do but wave goodbye.

— Isabel Cole

(Isabel previously wrote for OWOB about Liz Phair)