about
Allen Baron’s "Blast of Silence" is a movie that starts with an image and recollection of birth and is yet completely suffused from beginning to end with the inevitability of death. As the whiskey-and-nicotine-soaked voice of the narrator tells Frankie Bono, the film’s hitman protagonist, he was “born out of the cold, black silence” and to the cold black silence he will return. Perhaps this is what is meant by the “Slow Twilight”: life is nothing but a slow, inevitable journey back into the darkness.
The album's outro includes a line that references T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men”: “The world ends with a whimper, not a bang.” When Eliot wrote this poem, he was crawling out of the war-weary pessimism of “The Waste Land” and about to enter the brighter, devoutly Christian latter portion of his career. Thus a poem that at first glance appears to be a pessimistic meditation on death proves instead to have an ironic optimism, which sorta sums up what’s going on with "Blast of Silence" and The Slow Twilight. Death becomes rebirth, or at least relief and in the end we have one of the best albums to hit in a long time.
-David Ford
lyrics
The slow twilight, the ghost says, "Night night"
My right hand, the Dice Man, co-wrote my night life
In small black letters, I attack all senders
Young Philadelphians we should’ve know better
Stepped to the stage with the Blues Brothers pistol
Unloaded new slang, felt like Cujo had bit you
The senate is a beast, the senators are good men
The world ends with a whimper, not a bang, hold hands
Never heard me spit a bullet out my face
Tap the bottle, leave the trumpet in the case
This that shit that makes the bartender close early
Makes crooked cops sleep good in New Jersey
Rigid suttersteper lepper loverboy
Cuddle up with Tolstoy, etch a record, null in void
Still annoyed how she left me at the restaurant
Mami wanted EZ Bake but I don’t rest my thoughts
Ever, and that’s my biggest detri-
Ment, my brain is a submarine, no place to vent
I heard a beat sent from homie, now I’m rolling
Writing fire like a Phoenix, Jean Grey’s glowing
We’re on a roll like we’ll never grow old
Make a million dollars and never fold clothes
Break away from critics and never Stone Rose
Be about our business and kill a no-show
That’s the Shadowboxer code
The Hellraiser neighbors jumping out the box you closed
Still about our paper even when the banks choked
This shit is free like the style that I chose
Intimately you know Z like your folks
We started this in January and now it’s getting cold
Again, I’ve been, across the map, and then
Threw away a verse like caution to the wind
Slowed down recording and offed my label head
I’d rather lose a beat then have my peeps say “We ain’t friends”
So I made a new pact
Anything I chose now, thou art that
credits
from
The Slow Twilight LP,
released June 23, 2009
Beat by Douglas Martin aka Blurry Drones
Arrangement by Zilla Rocca
Lyrics by Zilla Rocca (S. Zales) for Three Dollar Pistol Music (ASCAP)
license
all rights reserved
