#expect the one about eurus either tomorrow or several weeks from now

[activatebutterflyshield]

Time to be long-winded about music again featuring the Four Winds albums by the Oh Hellos. I desperately hope this one will be shorter given how bloody long the thing about Coyote Stories ended up being so to somewhat ensure that this will be split up into four separate posts, one for each album. I’m going in chronological order of release. Come one, come all, but especially @writer-of-random-things, to see me put more effort into tumblr posts than my english essays.

Part 1: Notos (you are here!)

Part 2: Eurus

Part 3: Boreas

Part 4: Zephyrus

Before even getting into the songs, let’s look at the album art. A cicada, the hallmark of summer, buzzing in chorus for a few days before dying. They are a horde, second only to their cousins the bees, wasps, and locusts, but a horde nonetheless. The cicada blindly sits underground for most of its life, growing in solitude and waiting for its cue to escape to the sunlit world, mate, and die. A cicada does not question it’s place in the universe. A cicada harbors no thoughts of doubt in its mission, and holds no grudge when it dies under the sky. But humans are not cicadas.

The first song of the album is “On the Mountain Tall”, a relatively quiet start. It’s very biblical in its symbolism and imagery, but perhaps the most important lines are when the singer calls out, “Still the wild wind blows / Up our of the grave of an angry ghost / Firing bricks from broken canon and prose / To build a wall so high it reaches the heavens in the sky”. The spelling of “canon” is not that of the instrument of warfare on the high seas, but that of generally accepted truth when it comes to creative works, as well as religions. But it is used to describe an action much more befitting the weapon, as the “wild wind” is “Firing bricks from broken canon and prose”, a metaphor for using hypocritical or untrue logic and facts to defend itself. Whomever the singer is singing to, they want the singer to fear them and love them in equal measure, but the singer doesn’t. This nebulous thing is described as being “Quiet as a candle and bright as the / morning sun”, not unlike some angelic thing from on high, and yet whoever they are, they are not “He”, who is “not within them, the clatter of / brass and drums”.

“Torches” soon follows, a quicker paced tune of a back-and-forth between two singers. Each alludes to the other, “Father Ignorance” and “Mother Fortuna”, matching up with the leading male and female vocals. Both figures are referred to by the others as making either “Brothers of us all” or “Sisters of us all” through their actions, though neither seem to be very virtuous people. “Father Ignorance” seems to feed people’s anger and fear, setting “our torch aflame” and burning someone at the stake, no matter their innocence. “Mother Fortuna” turns “shadows into shapes”, stoking paranoia and encouraging violence despite the fact that “the faces in her wake / Look more like our own than the / effigies we immolate”. Neither singer seems to be the one from “On the Mountain Tall”, as the previous song was about someone resisting the carrots and sticks offered by someone quite similar to both Ignorance and Fortuna. And yet these two beings still have power, as they sing together, “We keep that old wheel turning / Over and over, again”, maintaining the endless cycle of fear, paranoia, anger, and destruction.

The next song is an instrumental interlude, “Planetarium Stickers on a Bedroom Ceiling”. It’s a gentle tune that slowly builds into the next song, “Constellations”, but the name alone indicates that whatever stars exist far above are not real things, but rather facsimiles. Pretty things, sure, but nothing like the real, burning, blazing balls of gas that dot the night sky.

“Constellations” begins slowly, as the singer describes the sensation of speaking something that takes their voice away and feels upon their tongue like “Brick and mortar, thick as scripture / Drawing lines in the sand and laying / borders as tall as towers / I babble on until my voice is gone”. The clear and more cloudy references to the Tower of Babel and the Empire of Babylon show how the singer has been confounded and confused by that thick and choking scripture. Everything good in their life, everything good done by them and to them are “like constellations, a million years away”, no more real than those “Planetarium Stickers on a Bedroom Ceiling”. What few pieces of joy they have are no more real than the lines drawn to create “Constellations”. But by the end of the song, those good stars are “imploding in the night / Everything is turning, everything is turning / The shapes that you drew may change beneath a different light / Everything you thought you knew / Will fall apart, but you’ll be alright”. The singer has realized how much they have been smothered by thick scripture, how little they know about the world, how much they want to be free, and how they have been denied their freedom by the world they grew up with, by Father Ignorance and Mother Fortuna.

The titular “Notos” is next, starting with the singer describing the world in the moments before the clouds break and a storm crashes down. The world is holding its breath, waiting for “A thunderous disturbance”, the inevitable response to what the singer has done to those “Planetarium Stickers on a Bedroom Ceiling”. But whatever the world is expecting is not what happens, as the rush that comes “will take you away / Like you’re caught in the undertow / And you will drown in the wake / Of the things you lost to the winds of Notos”. Everything the singer has lost to the thick scripture, all that the spent in hopes that the “Constellations” of good intentions would become real, is now being repaid tenfold over. Their realization is as strong as a hurricane, as untamable as the sea, and more furious than a thunderstorm in this moment. They’re drowning Fortuna and Ignorance in “the wake / Of the things you said that you can’t take back”. It’s a beautifully poetic description of the pure, flaming anger felt by someone in the moment they realized their betrayal, but as the final line of the song says, “You gotta let go”.

The second instrumental interlude of the album is “Mandatory Evac / Counting Cars”. Finishing the wordless cry that began in “Notos”, the song is a slow, gradual build up from gentle guitar strums to the beautiful melody that has haunted the background of the rest of the album, a promising echo that reminds the listener that they’ve come quite far since the beginning of this 20-minute journey, and that they’ve still got plenty of road left to travel.

The final song of Notos is “New River”. The singer’s tune is one of gradual change, of how “though the eons may pass as slow as the sands of an hour glass / Every grain that we’ve counted / Claims that even the mountains can change”. This promise that even the most permanent parts of the landscape can slowly but surely change, that the very land itself can bend to the power of a “New River”, is a powerful metaphor for the prospective journey of the singer. They yearn to carve out a new path, to rise with the tide and bask in the “rain for forty days and nights”, to embrace the change so abhorred by the “Planetarium Stickers on a Bedroom Ceiling”, to erode away where they had once stood “On the Mountain Tall”, to extinguish the “Torches” and prove the “Constellations” to be naught but lines drawn in the sky. Within this wind of “Notos” will they rise and remake themselves anew, casting off the thick scripture and ignoring the roaring fire and wind. The fiery Southern Wind of Summer has risen and raged, tearing apart the walls of “broken canon and prose”, and as stormy Notos leaves, Eurus of Autumn and the Eastern Wind will blow in from the horizon where the sun rises, bringing cooler times and heralding yet more change as migrations begin and more questions are asked.