A broken frame




The next week I go back to Co-op in campus town. I get the second album. There is a picture of what looks like a gypsy wielding a sickle on the cover. It still has the skyscraper sleeve. I remove the disc out of the elongated sleeve as the hippie behind the counter pints to a receptacle reminding me to recycle.


I nod.

 While walking home I stop at Mr. DONUTs and get a large coffee with cream and sugar. The young Columbus is always the last thing  on my mind yet it is always somehow looming. It is looming when I play DepecheMode, thinking about Karen Christmas last spring, wondering what she experienced. Thinking about the rush of traffic skirting along the Champs-Elysées.


It sounds like being ensconced in an amplified cavern  before slowly being suffocated by synthesized stalactites and day-glow bulbs of light. It is the first album that martin Gore pens in its entirety and which Dave Gahan’s vocals are threaded through the entire corpus. The album begins with a breath. A plosive whisper, a secret in the shape of a cosmological tear dripping like a wished for Chinese water torcher christening drop on the frontal lobe after each track.There is a syncopated warble. There is a constant echo, yelping into a chasm, an emotional abyss, the voice ricocheting back of you being not of your own, but of a British Angel.



The title track feels like the synthesizer is overturned and it a tempest is pending, looming. It is benevolent. It came out a year before Construction time again. It came out when I still would have been in preschool, an incantation of drones, there is something still-life- muffled porcelain in he way the song SEE YOU sounds, like it is trying to traverse through the heavily rococo slits of stain glass cathedral.


 After listening to a Broken frame I still can’t move. I arrive to school an hour early to do laps in the pool. My stress fracture is not healing as plan. I can hardly walk much less run. I feel like I did at the outset of Young Columbus—it seems like the harder I want something the more it perennially eludes my grip.


                                                             

Something that will never fully arrive.
 

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