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Anaestalgia

by Paper Plains

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    Paper Plains debut album Anaestalgia

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1.
Letting Go 03:04
It’s not often I care to think – care to dream, to remember – but, sometimes, I swear I just lose control. Does that make me weak, make me soft or vulnerable (for want of a better word), or is that just how I make sense of it all? Sometimes, I hear those songs and the memories attached come flooding right back, and it’s times like these in which time and I both freeze. So I’ll let the waves batter me until the tide recedes. I took those events, situations, conversations and I penned it all down, not to remember but to help forget. It’s so much easier to distance yourself when it’s all just words than erase a memory trapped in your head. Those days are lost in a haze of who was right, though neither could concede. Victory belongs to no one: belongs to nothing. Your name I shan't speak. Your consent I won't seek; it no longer holds relevance. So I’ll stumble through the haze and reflect on those days and what could have been.
2.
Did you see the better days? Do you remember when we were younger, before the weight of the world had turned us all against each other? Now, we’re forced to fend for ourselves (and maybe the lucky few we love) while those left behind are left to ask help from above. Now, arrogance is instilled from birth, as naturally as falling leaves. If you can’t be there for others, who’ll be there when you’re in need? Arrogance has taken over and we live our lives for greed: “Fuck what I can do for you. Ask what you can do for me." So much love was lost in genius playlists and convenience: online substitutes for what we used to do to show we cared. Now I can’t see the point in love when chivalry is dead, so I’m making mixtapes instead. I thought I used to love you and I thought that you loved me, but that distant memory has become a lucid dream. Was life always this way or changed recently? Was I too young to notice, or just too naïve? Now, charity is a dirty word. We naturally form these cohorts of ignorance to each other – ensconced in the shit we've bought. Selflessness lies in the corner and grows frail on life support, where what I can do for you won't warrant a second thought.
3.
I’ll paint you the setting but it’s not here in the West – rather, in the East Coast back in 2010. You and I had only just met but we were doomed to become the best of friends. Will Wagner had a broken collarbone and the SSB stole our hearts so far from home. It took two tries and a small white lie to get out of a public urination fine. I can't remember a single point over the five days when I wasn’t a complete and utter drunken disgrace and regress to classic Patty: getting drunk, trying to touch everyone within reach’s face. The art in the streets, this thriving music scene, so, with envy, paint me green. Just how I wished that these nights were never-ending. In the city in which I met my first real sweetheart, I found myself making decisions that nearly tore me apart. We snuck glass bottles past security guards ‘cause we couldn’t fathom the idea of drinking out of plastic cups. I stand strongly behind every single breath, every decision I've made, every single fucking step that I took to end up right here ‘cause there’s still nowhere else that I’d rather be. There’s nowhere else that I’d rather be. So on the flight back to my home by heart sunk and I became undone, but I took solace in the fact that this time next year I’d be right back to eating Big Macs without meat, and, if you please, hold the cheese 'cause I’m drunk and stranded in a foreign city, but it still feels like home to me. I'm drunk and stranded in this foreign city and there's still nowhere else that I'd rather be.
4.
So much time has passed and who were we to kid ourselves? We knew it would never last, despite how much we tried to keep it in our grasp 'cause time is strange and time will change everything in one sense and nothing in the next. It will shape us and throw us onto another path, and while we mourn the death of what was once our world, we can’t deny we’re better off now, somehow. But there comes a time when you realise that it's time to once again hold your head up high, 'cause that storm subsides each and every time despite the feeling that it never will. You’ve gotta keep on moving. You can't stand still. So what do we do with all these broken pieces? Do we try to pick them up and put them back together again? Well, I don’t know if I’ve got the strength and I don’t know if you’ve got the strength.
5.
Lion King 02:31
We can make a coffee table book of your armchair philosophy but I’m afraid that your appeals to the worst what-ifs are lost on me because my life has been defined by the bottle caps in my pockets and celebrations of the ties that bind everyone on this goddamned planet. With friends like these, who needs anything else? If I’m a “shadow of [my] former self”, it means the light around me was bright enough to make it appear so tonight. We can make a compendium of your bumper sticker rhetoric – of each retrograde, maudlin appeal to the otherwise apathetic – but my thoughts have been refined by the questions with no real answers from conversations replayed in my mind from years ago with Moss and Francis. So throw my shit to the kerb and see what sells, because chasing shadows just never felt like a productive or worthwhile way to live and yet it seems all you’ve got to give.
6.
Tusk 04:15
Now I know, because I’ve grown, that there are those – more unwilling than unable to let go (but, admittedly, it’s not an easy thing for anybody). And, as we age, time accelerates and each new day begs for fresh memories to be made, but we must hold onto those that shaped us into who we’ve become. It’s far too easy to care way too much for the unimportant things and far too difficult to care enough for the little things that hold our worlds up, or appreciate the things we’ve got for what they’re really worth when they’re right here, in our ignorant comfort of believing they’re untouchable. We lie in wait, so susceptible. You cannot know what it is to feel the weight of loss until you've let yourself truly and unconditionally love. I've cried so many tears that I thought I had none left, but I saved some I knew I'd need for the years ahead. So make haste; time is of the essence. In each moment of hesitation we allow slipping seconds to bleed and erect barriers between ourselves and our dreams. In life's throes, we do our best not to break before we bend. And with the weight of the world on my shoulders, with each day growing a little bit colder, with my eyes being blinded by the sun, the darkness is closing the gap as I run. Our hearts will break a multitude of times, and in a plethora ways, over the course of our lives, regardless of their respective length. They’ll keep on beating, though deformed and bent out of shape.
7.
It’s been so long since I last spoke your name and it feels so wrong being back here again. I’ve always hoped you were doing better than I but I see you now: a face I don’t recognise. What ever happened to these city streets? My darling, you haven’t aged well. The foundation of my early memories, I’ll never come back to this hell. I feel we’ve lost it forever, but don’t say it’s a sign of the times. Though I’d hate to say it’s the end, I guess she just gave up the fight. Now the path won’t speak your name like it once did and the grass won’t feel the same as when you were a kid. You can no longer write on the asphalt with the rocks on the side of the road, but you can paint on the walls; they have no character anymore. No familiar faces, none of the same places. Stay off the road. It’s a dangerous place for a kid, don’t you know?
8.
So Little Hamzah was four years old when the effects of neglect took their toll in the squalid bedroom that would serve as his tomb until they found him two years after he’d died – mummified and buried within. Shit, at that age, I was full of beans – bouncing on my mate’s backyard trampoline or playing with my Batman figurines and hiding my eyes from the scary scenes in the movies my folks would let me watch, sitting either side of me on the couch. That disparity is just too fucking much for my laughably feeble mind to clutch: we’re only separated by the laws by which chance abides and the simply arbitrary lines by which out small world divides. It seems petty and cheap to spend too much of my day sweating the little things that never went my way. If I’m not buried in a room that’s fetid and dank, I can thank my lucky stars that I have lucky stars to thank.

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released March 30, 2014

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Paper Plains Perth, Australia

Paper Plains is a quartet of friends merging an array of musical influences and experiences in order to create a type of alt- rock which communicates a variety of contemplative lyrical themes, so joining their local peers with a DIY ethic and willingness to punch above their weight.

Debut album "Anaestalgia" available now!
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