Bastille has done it again with their latest release “‘&’ (Ampersand),” especially with their quintessential melancholy guitar notes throughout 14 songs that is just over 51 minutes. Here are my main takeaways.
“Intros & Narrators” is a terrific leadoff song. The simple and quick tempo of the guitar is a perfect way to hook listeners into the album. Lead singer Dan Smith invites listeners to keep in mind various fictional stories and the emotional impacts of what he’s . The reason that “Intros & Narrators” is its own song and not the synopsis of the album is because Smith says in the lyrics, he is an unreliable narrator, meaning that all the songs he’s subsequently conveying serve a purpose for him as a storyteller. This is like Taylor Swift’s eleventh studio album “THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT,” which was also told from the point of view of an unreliable narrator.
“Eve & Paradise Lost” portrays the biblical figure Eve’s fall from the Garden of Eden. The nuance of this track is trying to show that it takes two to tango, and that it’s not all her fault, with lyrical references such as “we gave into temptation / shame came, we put on some clothes” and “we both ate the fruit” and “I was made from you.” Eve’s fabled fall is used as an allegory for the hidden message: a mea culpa to a past relationship. This is underlined in the song by the slow guitar and quiet background choir, confirmed by the lyrics
“Emily & Her Penthouse in the Sky” is akin to Sherlock Holmes and his “mind castle,” where Arthur Conan Doyle’s genius mentally stored all the bits of information he . The kicker here is while this “Penthouse” is not as solid as 221B Baker , it functions similarly to both physical and metaphorical locations. The penthouse is a place where the mentioned Emily can collect her innermost thoughts and emotions, as proof of the fact that the subject of the story has been alright all along – she’s just a little different.
“Leonard & Marianne” is a “situationship” soundtrack. On my first listen, my first connection was to the novel “Normal People” by Sally Rooney, so much so that I thought of my own situationship when I first heard this song. With the singer begging his significant other to never take him back again, he contradicts himself by saying that no matter his circumstance, in his mind and heart, he’s back with them. The deep-octave piano paired with the gentle violin-and-cello duo was the perfect combination to pull at the heart strings. Arguably, making me list this as the song with the most emotional gravitas on the entire album. Tied for my favorite in this album, I don’t remember the last time a song had this kind of emotional grip on me.
“Seasons & Narcissus” enters on an upswing with guitar, alluding to seasons changing and love entering the life of the artist, almost in the same childish disbelief of when flowers start blooming in spring after a brutally cold winter. It’s currently listed as this album’s most streamed song on Spotify, probably for its optimistic flavor.
Finally, “Zheng Yi Sao & Questions For Her” was crafted for strong, independent and opinionated women. A pirate in the South China seas and a woman no less, “existence was not simple in her day. In the artist’s acknowledgement of the subject’s life struggles as a woman in her time, he asks her “how did you find grace under all that pressure” and “how did you do it.” However, I’m convinced that this is just another tactic to talk about a former lover. He keeps repeating in the chorus, “how did you do it,” making me wonder if this is directed at a lover that wronged him. It is tied for my favorite song on the album, because it reminds me of my past relationships, where I kept asking myself how I did what I did (or sometimes didn’t do).
