Originally released on vinyl LP only in 1990 on Suburbs Are Hell (UK).
One of childhood's first lessons learned is that all the colors mixed make black, In the end, at the dispensary window, the lesson is learned anew: Mix all the colors, you'll get black, A comforting notion to keep, but what happens in between? How does one get even that far? Surely, there are certain lessons that are harder to come by. Herein, our beloved Always (aka "Mr Wright") takes us on a shut-in's tour of the world, a deep blue blur, brake cables cut and laughing all the way. We're assuming the worst and savoring the sick assumption, our hearts liberated (not stolen, there's a distinction) moments before most certain disaster. These are sighed stories of an England bound under a brewer's batch of sky, alive with the most unsettling possibilities, twinkling like silver starlets that wander the streets in the sharpest Mary Quant costumes, with sleeves that buckle in back, choreographed to the squall of sound underneath the melodies, He's conjured a ghostly new Supremes, but stripped and scraped until the darkest heart is exposed, this is pop music under the strictest rationing, threadbare and trembling, but still and truly pop music, It's all there in abundance in these diaries of chaotic proposition, an absolute swirl of treacherous notions. Much like the Eames' technicolor short "Kaleidoscope Jazz Chair, these are ballads "romancing the everyday," a little danger, a little stranger, a world of office supplies and waiting rooms, tower blocks and parking lots, a shifting, swirling mass of the gloriously desperately ordinary, shellacked thick over the butterflies that stir in a criminal mind, Deadly slow-motion novellas where the pen is mightier than the sword in the properly trained hand, and easier to get through the metal detectors. You're not paying any attention; it's all sweetness and light, such a pleasant diversion, "If only I'd learned to whistle..," and he'll get away with it all over again. You'll be sat adrift, soaking in the manicurist's chair with your mind on someone else's money and you'll catch a slender shadow, a flutter by your ear in the jasmined air, in an instant it's over. Oh, he'll expatriate, erase himself and denounce the whole affair as fabrication, brilliantly blurred in a letter to the courts, and let the blood red tales teem and bloom and warp the decks in his absence, The songs love you in their own fashion, fear not. They'll send you for a midnight stroll in the Thames in custom cement oxfords, yes... but they'll feed the cat while you're away. You'll listen again and again with your glass to the palace wall, but you'll miss him. Crouched cautious in coat closets, at the air ducts, between the parked cars, still and listening, detonator in hand, but you'll miss him every time. What a shame.
