Year of The Bird (Volume 4)

by Pale Bird

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  • Streaming + Download

    Pre-order of Year of The Bird (Volume 4). You get 8 tracks now (streaming via the free Bandcamp app and also available as a high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more), plus the complete album the moment it’s released.
    Purchasable with gift card
    releases December 23, 2019

      £7 GBP  or more

     

  • Full Digital Discography

    5
    releases

    Get all 5 Pale Bird releases available on Bandcamp and save 25%.

    Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality downloads of Year of The Bird (Volume 4), Year Of The Bird (Volume 3), Year of The Bird (Volume 2), Year of the Bird (Volume 1), and Ten Things Which Aren't Love. , and , .

    Purchasable with gift card

      £25.50 GBP or more (25% OFF)

     

1.
04:09
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2.
02:43
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3.
03:34
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4.
02:39
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5.
03:51
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6.
03:11
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7.
04:06
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8.
04:20
lyrics
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9.
Semi-prepared remarks for a surprise awards ceremony
10.
Goodbye, 2018

credits

releases December 23, 2019

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all rights reserved

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Track Name: Man, I Just Had The Weirdest Dream
Man, this city’s a humid clamshell
I heard about it in the movies
Just a lot of people talking
Had I come here in the 80s
The actors wouldn’t be on screen
Weirdest people, daring us to think
Dream about something we can’t see
Back of envelope, blotted black with ink

On top of Covert Park
The river surrounded me
Bus dropped me off back here somehow
There was nowhere else I had to be
Do you feel like you missed the bus?
You got off a stop too late
Ever feel like you’re still working it out?
Have a feeling you should have stayed?

Those towers are crystal daggers
Dreams pinned down by glass and steel
That used to be downtown
Are you missing how that feels?
Just now a woman passed
Completely focussed on what was in her hands
Real cloudy-looking jar of something
I didn’t even stop to ask

Mean what you say, your words
They’re so abstract, so confusing
So earnest and so strange
Vivid and deranged, full of what you feel
It’s possible, it’s the only way
Just pour yourself into that jar
Like a drummer stuck in a groove
Completely obsessed with getting to what’s
Real
Track Name: Suggestions for Halloween
We learned through conjuration
By giving our demons flesh
They could at last be vanquished
We formed our congregation
Each one as a horror dressed
Armed with highfalutin language

Anna was spiders, eating up the city
Danny was fascism, that wasn’t pretty
Rita was earthquakes, shaking up the ground
Jeff was no meaning to be found
Leslie was turning into her mother
Dave went as The Other

We all looked so good
Putting on our fear
Terror seemed so passe
When it bears the face
Of someone you hold dear
Disguised with paper mâché

Mark came dressed as H R Giger’s Alien
Alice came as desertification
Kerry was the fear that this fear will never leave again
James dressed up as Nyarlathotep
I was unoriginal
I came as the whole universe

J was losing all their hair
Katie was falling down the stairs
Ahsan was flying through the air
Brendon was being savaged by a bear

Bob came as no one liking him
Alex came as your life not mattering
Charlie came as being trapped in a sentient world of pain for all eternity
Chris was dressed as being unable to help and protect the ones you love
Joseph K came as his dad
Track Name: All Least We Got Some Decent Punk
I love how this city’s oozing art
It’s being squeezed so hard
You’re a bubble rising up
A they’ll never let you pop

I know I’m not the only one
Afraid to fall asleep

I love the noise coming off the street
As you twist your heel around
At least we got some decent punk
It’s hard not to love that sound

I know I’m not the only one
Who’s scared they will never wake
If they fall asleep in the passenger seat
Pull over, this has to be the place
Track Name: The Cascade Mountains
The cascade mountains are a range formed in, and still capable of exerting, terrifying destructive power. In the late 1990s, the area around Mount Rainier experienced a huge tectonic pressure, itself the direct consequence of aftershocks from a seismic shift emanating several centuries before in central and northern England - one that made subsequent events seem benign by comparison, until the incredible geological era of the 20th century. In 1997, gigantic crystal shards erupted from the ground across southwest Canada, trapping people in a glassy maze of soap bubble Chrysanthemum and glittering mandibles. Some of these structures were hundreds of stories tall, and many there found in difficult to stay among this unfamiliar environment. Others still flocked to become part of this newly-discovered phenomenon.

Even before the eruption of Mount St Helens in May 1980, geological events were already have their impacts on the people of Portland, Oregon, Seattle, Washington, and the wider Pacific Northwest, as they experienced an influx of refugees from the fault-riddled valleys of Northern California. Luckily, many of these refugees brought with them the valuable skills of engineering, brewing, and the precious resources of sourdough and kombucha cultures, saved from the teetering ruins of the cities they were fleeing. Many years later, in the 2010s, fires began to break out along the unstable San Andreas Fault, centred around three locations: Firstly, performance venues unloved by capital; secondly, in the countryside around homes of people who did not work for tech firms with a multibillion dollar valuation; and thirdly, in a phenomenon science cannot explain, Rupert Murdoch’s house.

Geologists believe the Central Valley filled first with sand; then with fire; then with water; and are predicting that next it will fill with stone; then paper; then scissors.
Track Name: Minnesota Sunrise
Did I lose a friend, or keep an enemy I’d made at arm’s length?
I trust my senses when my gut feeling is strong
That doesn’t mean I’m never wrong
You don’t lay out bear traps to catch a mouse
Or if you do, it’s overkill
And all the time you spend
Driving dearest friends to the nearest hospital

I stepped out wearing only what god gave me
In a Minnesota sunrise
I wondered if the place would want to hurt me
It was 260 Kelvin

You don’t have to close the doors
Pull the curtains, never love again
Train a girl to fuck up men
No more kissing frogs
But hey - guess what? Frogs are people too
In this metaphor
Frogs have feelings, some are brightly coloured, delicate
Some of them are poisonous
Some of them will sing for you
If you ask them
Make a soothing noise for us
Track Name: A Sad Bat
Black spartan lands
Salt flats and pans
Vast, Atacaman, all asphalt and glass
What a man saw was that sand as a maw
Past as a path, as a trap, as a flaw

A scarab ball, an alarm, a star fall
Mark that dark patch that casts a ghost pall
Craft a small map - salad days call!
Grasp at that canvas, claw as an awl

Dark falls past days
Man sat at a camp
Palm wraps an arm and a scarf wraps a hand
Was that a jackdaw, a hawk, a sad bat?
Warmth crawls as dawn draws an arc, a sharp band
Track Name: Fire at Sea
You used to dream
Of that marmalade flame settling over the water
From the bow of boat, where the tanks overflow

And the air up above
Was an impassible wood
Twisting black yews
Dark as the crude

How that fills up my memories, I’d never realised
How that fills up my dreams, I never knew

And that lone wolfish hunger
When a young man sees float into view
A city at night for the very first time
New York or London or Tokyo or Rome

A sailor is someone that we all hope to be
A sailor is someone without any home

If you don’t want to burn, you can turn your head down
From the top of the ocean
Let it cover your crown
And dive deep towards the inevitable

But this dream that you had never appeared
And you gave away your parrot
And you trimmed back your beard

And you made your way back from the sea
To a place where you can run from the fire, or at least
There’s always rescue at hand
You made your way back to the land
You made your way back home
Track Name: Maslow
Run - Put one foot in front of the other and keep pushing forward,
toward… that doesn’t matter, this is all you have to remember
Cold and wet, it’s dark and I’m hungry - I feel
so weary - why the hell do I have to be
You don’t have to keep on running
You don’t have to keep on going
Do you think anyone will notice
I don’t think anyone will notice
I don’t know if some Higher
Power animates my steps
But if it’s going to
Show Its hand
it’s still got
Half the
story
left

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