This Ceaseless Stretch Of White

Ratboys “Crying About the Planets” (AudioTree Session)

I’d meant to write about a song from the new Ratboys record months ago – the album came out in late June – but it fell off my radar for a while. But it makes sense to come back around to “Crying About the Planets” now, since it’s such a winter song. The first four minutes of the song are slow and quiet, evoking the near stillness of a landscape just after snowfall. There’s a cautiousness to its swaying rhythm, and the guitar tone is slight and brittle. Julia Steiner’s lyrics sketch out a story of a man falling beneath the ice of a frozen lake, and admit to that inspiring a suicidal fantasy. The key bit, though, is that she immediately clarifies that she does not actually want to die. But even with her insisting that she “can’t quit this,” the tone of the song is incredibly bleak. She sounds trapped and alone, and though the heavy climax of the song is a bit cathartic, it hardly sounds like a resolution to the feeling.

Buy it from Bandcamp.