‘Tears Are’ – The Orielles: a rugged climb without a view of the summit
The wonderful thing about music is that every piece of it is open to interpretation, but it’s rarer, in the case of a band like The Orielles, that they pour this opportunity straight into the listener’s hands.
This is exactly where we find ourselves in the Manchester band’s latest single ‘Tears Are’, taken from their forthcoming album Only You Left, set for release on March 13th. Nothing about the song is straightforward in every sense of the word, and instead, there is a landscape of no solidity, no concrete shapes, and seemingly no escape.
To begin in a perhaps obvious place, the title of the track begs no obvious questions, but equally no obvious answers. As the band’s bassist, Esmé Dee Hand-Halford, puts it: “You could think of something deeply human. But you could also answer it in a completely linguistic sense and think of a tear as a symbol or an image.” In essence, there is no specific meaning, and thus, we are still left with a completely blank page.
There is, admittedly, something quite liberating about that ability to be granted a totally free take on a track, but, then again, without any form of delineated boundaries, dimensions, or limits, the track can ironically begin to feel somewhat stuck in the sheer expansiveness of the liminal space it is clearly designed to exist in.
In the space where ‘Tears Are’ opens, there’s a deep-seated grunge bassline and riff which reels the listener into its hook, beguiled by Hand-Halford’s soft and intimate vocal. Yet, by the time this enters into the second verse, the effect has somewhat loosened its grip, making it easier to let go and lose sight of what the song is building up to.
As such, at the midway point when the sonics veer from pounding grunge into a dreamland soundscape, there is only really the possibility to be beguiled if you have been listening intently all along the path. The notes are ethereal and transportative, but to the casual listener, they somewhat risk becoming too airheaded and whimsical to take on any real gravitas.
It may sound obvious to say at this point, given the description that has already been outlined, but ‘Tears Are’ ends as a completely different song to how it began. It is, of course, a mark of massive musical free-spiritedness, but the lack of overall cohesion gives way to a niggling feeling that there was never a huge sense of purpose this whole time.
You can imagine that The Orielles themselves may beg to differ on this front, offering up all kinds of reasonings, meanings, and resolutions as to why things are the way they are, which is all totally valid. Therein is also where lies the issue with stating no boundaries for your work: it can cultivate the wildest imaginings, yet also leave you stranded in a void of nothingness.
This is absolutely not an attempt to say that ‘Tears Are’ is a five-minute effort of nothingness; it possesses a real heart and ingenuity which is hard-pressed to find in a landscape akin to what we have at the moment. However, the journey to the top of the mountain, only for the view at the top to completely disappear, is the slightly disappointing outcome to what should have been the most promising flight.
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