Get all 11 Construction & Destruction releases available on Bandcamp and save 70%.
Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality downloads of Former Firsts, Revolution C, Noli Timere, Cousins/Construction & Destruction Split, DARK LARK, Winter Studies EP, MUTATIS MUTANDIS, Video et Taceo, and 3 more.
Excludes supporter-only releases.
1. |
Sick Again
02:47
|
|||
Sick again.
This is a lonely mend.
Don’t come in,
my only friend.
Will we die here?
Will we have been long apart?
Can you really change anything?
Can you change my heart?
|
||||
2. |
||||
I feel the presence of an
aneurysm of regret.
I hear it in me.
It has a pulse, like:
___ __ ___ .
It looms a history
of itself!
Makes an encampment
and starves me out!
It looms a history
of itself!
Makes an encampment
and starves me out!
It’s a spade, it’s a spade, it’s a spade
in a dense black dirt!
It’s a spade, it’s a spade, it’s a spade
in a dense black earth!
It’s a spade, it’s a spade, it’s a spade
in a dense black dirt!
I feel the presence of an
aneurysm of regret.
It holds court;
it crooks its finger and
beckons me in.
It looms a history
of itself!
And it bandies me about!
It looms a history
of itself!
And bandies me about!
It’s a spade, it’s a spade, it’s a spade
in a dense black dirt!
It’s a spade, it’s a spade, it’s a spade
in a dense black earth!
It’s a spade, it’s a spade, it’s a spade
in a dense black dirt!
|
||||
3. |
Cato
03:33
|
|||
Humiliation burning all over!
A hand under the gown.
To put cup to lips.
To put blade to gut.
To make an end in decent
silence.1
Your advice is spraying all over.
It punctuates your chamber walls.
You never stop until I’m doubled over.
Humiliation burning all over!
You are asking for the sword.
Enemies advancing on the shore.
Tunic-less statue of stoicity,
muster an act of staunch finality!
Humiliation burning all over! […]
1 “I have heard that one ought to make an end in decent silence. Quiet yourselves and endure.”
-Socrates to his students (including Phaedo) in Phaedo, from Great Dialogues of Plato, which recounts the eve of Socrates’ death by complicit hemlock consumption. Plutarch reported that the Phaedo was read by Cato the Younger (95 - 46 BCE) on the night of Cato’s death by self-disembowelment.
|
||||
4. |
Pillaged Cache
05:05
|
|||
Leave now the body,
torn limb from limb,
itself a branch that
crowds you in.
Follow the trickle
into the frac’.
Disown the mass.
Disown the mass!
I had a secret garden
and it grew up all around me.
And nettled me,
and dockled me,
and pressed me without pardon.
The pack!
Strength in a pack!
Bound to a covenant;
to an ancient contract!
Attacked!
Becoming a lack!
A husk;
a pillaged cache!
Oh, and you! Can’t get at it!
Can’t get at it!
Can’t get at it, to refute it!2
Make like the reader at the window,
looking out,
and in, and in.
Make like the tabula rasa,
let it all begin again.
Let it all begin again!
I had a secret garden
and it grew up all around me.
And nettled me,
and dockled me,
and pressed me without pardon!
The pack!
Strength in a pack!
Bound to a covenant;
to an ancient contract!
Attacked!
Becoming a lack!
A husk;
a pillaged cache!
Oh, and you! Can’t get at it!
Can’t get at it!
Can’t get at it, to refute it!
Leave now the body… […]
2 "Men will fight for superstition as quickly as for the living truth -- even more so, since a superstition is intangible, you can't get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable."
-Hypatia of Alexandria (370-415 BCE)
|
||||
5. |
Loved It
02:12
|
|||
You would’ve loved it here!
On ‘ back of this old harvester.
Looking out on all these crimson hills.
Looking out on all these crimson hills!
In the gigantic late-summer sky,
did I see your face?
Didn’t I see your eyes?
You would’ve loved it here.
You are the dying summer.
Last dance, the end of romance.
Never a dying summer without you.
Never a drunken night without you!
When you said you’d come out
and see me,
I asked, “Why?”
Why, why, why would I say that!?
‘Cause you would have loved it here!
You would’ve loved it!
|
||||
6. |
The Horse Returns
03:40
|
|||
I see the horse, I see the horse.
I am lying in the field.
I am broken, I am shaken.
I am broken, I am shaken.
But I see the horse!
I see the horse! I see the horse!
I see the horse!
I see the horse!
I see the horse! I see the horse!
I see the horse!
And she may come back towards me.
So plant your hands to either side.
And raise yourself up, woman.
You need not shake the dirt from your hands
(-you’ll know it soon enough again).
You can carry it with you;
it can be your talisman!
So go on, heave!
And drink in
the invitation that kind beast extends.
The body beneath you will carry you home.
The animal under you breathes well!
I see the horse!
I see the horse! I see the horse!
I see the horse!
I see the horse!
I see the horse! I see the horse!
I see the horse!
So go on, heave!
Don’t sink complicitly!
Absence all around you and moving in.
Absence all around you and moving in!
The body beneath you will carry you home.
The animal under you breathes well!
The body beneath you will carry you home.
The animal in you breathes!
|
||||
7. |
Crow
04:05
|
|||
I broke a wheel trying to get up to you,
on this tangled wire of road.
This time the omen is neither
hoot nor crow;
it’s the dark whistle of our abode.
Maybe this house is no destination.
I leave my shoes on all the time.
I put my head through the wall again.
I wrecked our home;
I wrecked my spine.
I heard the sound all above me.
Wings cutting air like swinging rope.
The thing was trying to get across to me
something I didn’t want to know.
A caw is something like a handsaw:
all dark and oily, Feathered Crow.
All is silent but for the jump rope.
Oh…
We had our wine and we are
drunk again.
All fall-bright white sun and coloured groves.
Fermented fields all in tangled flight.
They hover low; we’re all aglow.
But these days went as they always go.
The weather bowls and the sap slows.
All bright white snow and the
long old night.
And the sky is pale against the crow.
|
||||
8. |
||||
Even in slumber I ready my hand,
scour scars and the lay of the land.
Onslaughts will rise up and
claw back the face.
Torrents will lash down
and pound the place.
Now soundless vacuum; now
raging gale.
Now leviathan; now sounding whale.
I ride a flash flood of
Beckett’s tongued pebbles and
Woolf’s calm, palmed stones.
Sophocles’ tree is awash in me
and I can bend!
I repent!
I can bend!
Spark into flare into dark!
The thirst and the slake; the two!
Even in slumber I ready my hand,
scour scars and the lay of the land.
Onslaughts will rise up and
claw back the face.
Torrents will lash down
and pound the place.
Now soundless vacuum; now
raging gale.
Now leviathan; now sounding whale.
Spark into flare into dark!
The thirst and the slake; the two!
|
||||
9. |
||||
When I talk, I talk through you.
When I walk, I walk right through.
Stop!
I need to be stopped.
I can’t shake;
shake out the ache.
Will you keep the gate?
Oh no! It happened again.
This cannot! happen again.
Hot! hot! hot!
I’m burning through you!
The wick got lit, it’s going down quick!
Oh, and I
take! take! take!
I take the cake.
Will you keep the gate?
|
||||
10. |
The New Puritans
04:46
|
|||
Comes the phalanx of Truth!
Come the New Puritans!
Come they marching on you,
do the New Puritans!
So swallow the smoke,
and quiet the crying.
Let the wild be broke
and the defiant prostrated.
Comes the phalanx of Truth!
Come the New Puritans!
Come they wreaking virtue,
do the New Puritans!
The center cannot hold!
We see the handlers in the wings!
We see the forest and the trees!
We see you prune it back mercilessly!
Still you can’t bring it to its knees! […]
|
Construction & Destruction Port Greville, Nova Scotia
Spook rock book roll, emanating from the Atlantic littoral..
Contact Construction & Destruction
Streaming and Download help
If you like Construction & Destruction, you may also like:
Bandcamp Daily your guide to the world of Bandcamp