#I'd go with Loom for its simplicity

[floramuniverse]

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[kittenintheden]

Wyll WIP Wednesday

the lovely @pursuitseternal gave me a tag so I figured I'd post a snip of the Wyllstravaganza chapter I'm working on AND a lil snip of the next NYS chapter (flashback time). here you go <3

Scar Tissue snip

The horse, Calla, whinnies softly, relaxing and lowering her head under his firm hands as he soothes her. Wyll doesn’t bother to saddle her, hopping up and riding bareback as he’d done all too often as a young boy. Calla doesn’t care for it, but she trusts him and a part of her understands his urgency. Every moment feels precious.

A few lamps flicker on in homes here and there as Wyll races by, Calla’s hooves striking sharply on the stone street. He pays them no mind, attention solely focused on his destination. The hill looms larger ahead, its normally red stone appearing near black in the night.

There, another flash of fire, gone again quick as a heartbeat.

And then Wyll’s world promptly ends.

Not Your Sweetheart snip

The air all around him is filled with music and merriment. Astarion grins with it, turning in a slow circle as he absorbs the soiree taking place – people of all manner of import, dressed in such finery. Some sparkle with jewelry as if they’ve been rolled in diamond dust, others prefer the intrigue of dark velvets and silks. Towering candelabras and enchanted lights cast the great hall in a warm yellow glow.

Astarion adjusts the lapels of his own coat. It’s quite nice, elegant in its simplicity, and tailored to fit him very well. He added some subtle hand embroidery around the cuffs himself, but that’s the best he could manage. It’s nothing like some of the outfits the upper echelon wear. Those likely cost a year’s worth of his own not-entirely-modest salary.

Not entirely modest, but hardly what it could be. Which is why he’s here.

Tagging: anyone who'd like to participate, honestly, I can never keep track of who's already been tapped!

[ranking-every-roxette-song]

Ranking Every Roxette Song, #102-104

104. Good Karma

from Good Karma

This is the big one, the giant to tame. When I made the questionable decision of reading TDR’s review of Good Karma before listening to the album itself, this was the song that stood out, receiving glowing praise that promised something so great that we hadn't heard the likes of it from Marie and Per for decades. I shouldn't have read that review, but just couldn't wait, Good Karma being the first Rox album release that I'd followed properly. The introduction bodes well for all that promise, with a huge pairing of "Fading Like A Flower"-like piano and guitar, even more forceful than before. Quickly switching to a minimalistic EDM beat, it continues with one of the changes that make this feel more like a marriage of two disparate songs than a progression that builds some sort of drama. The production is full of synth after synth flashing in and out of sight like sea spray on the side of a ship, never giving us a chance to look at them but still allowing the feeling of frantic motion to come across. It ends up a beautiful sonic picture, but then the chorus comes in. The bombast of the guitars, bubbly bass, unhinged synths, cowbell and Marie together is a sudden surge that should feel absolutely huge. Somehow, it doesn’t connect with the rest of the song’s sections for me as well as it obviously should, and that always leaves me conflicted when listening. On one hand, it’s the point of this absolutely slamming chorus to provide a sudden change from the atmospherics of the verses; on the other, its production is also so huge and powerful that it doesn’t move as well as it could have done, had there been a more fluid groove under the guitars. Still, though in my view the bits of “Good Karma” don’t flow together amazingly well, there is a Son Of A Plumber-like old-fashioned bridge in the middle of the thing, and it’s gorgeous. Reading TDR’s reactions back in 2016 did hurt me in the end - it could have been as fantastic as they said, but remains just a great effort on everyone’s part that I will undoubtedly go back to sometimes.

103. Bringing Me Down To My Knees

from Room Service

There’s been a few songs in Per Gessle’s career that have been said (sometimes by him) to sound as if he’d written them in his sleep, or at least when woken up in the middle of the night. And that, I think, is absolutely a compliment - whether it’s “Gut Feeling”, “Vilket håll du än går”, “Big Black Cadillac”, or this one, they’re very immediate, simple and very him. If the world had let them get their way, Roxette would have been able to churn out songs like this forever without them getting any less lovely. More than anything, “Bringing Me Down To My Knees” is comforting. It opens with a warm line that combines guitar and synth to wind around the opening chords like the sonic equivalent of a wide smile, which is then encased loosely in the blanket of the production. That simple sine-wave sound kept popping up in Per's material almost non-stop around this time. The instruments are all bubbly, amber-coloured substances from the lab where songs are grown, and it’s functioning at full normalcy here, with new melodies and synth swells constantly rising from the vials, expanding and then falling peacefully. Marie is comfortable and earnest, making the song speak magnificently as usual and only ever finding any vocal intensity a few times. There is an acoustic guitar solo over a middle 8 that also can't be called one of the most ambitious ever, but that too works in its favour - it’s so completely effortless. The Backstreet Boys would have been mightily jealous of it, had they ever taken the time to listen to Room Service during breaks between choreography rehearsals and being fleeced by their fraudulent manager. The post-chorus string line in this is brilliant too, providing the same sort of reassuring simplicity. That’s the thing here, so much is achieved by trying so little that thinking about why it works can only confuse you further. Just like the song says, you can’t put your finger on it, it’s only possible to enjoy the ride and listen to several masters of the craft go relaxedly about their work.

102. Half A Woman, Half A Shadow

from Look Sharp!

Marie’s songs are always special points on Roxette’s albums. There’s not ever that many of them, but they do stand out from the surrounding crowd, with a different tinge to how the chord voicings, harmonies and melodies are put together. Though the lyrics to this one are again of Mr. G’s creation, you can very much tell that all around and underneath them is something different. Marie’s sophisticated harmonies are all over this, not just in the layering of voice but in the overlapping synths and guitar arpeggios that spell out big chords, as well as the dreamy pianos that come in later on. It’s all very much a sparkling new locomotive barreling confidently through a twilit misty morning landscape, and underneath this sheen there is the massive beat carrying the two awesome lead guitar lines. It does remind me a bit of “If She Knew What She Wants” by the Bangles, but slowed down, brightened, psyched up and made absolutely huge through Clarence Ofwerman’s magic production and Jonas Isaacson’s massive guitars. I don’t know how he does it, but an absolutely perfect image of a cold sun looming nearer over the horizon is conjured up in his solo. The ending is a wonderfully trippy experience too, with gratuitously phased and flanged sounds all smudging and washing down into the cold earth. In this song we find not so much half a woman as a crowd of them, with a corresponding amount of shadows, all blasting their way through the rain, away from a past that deserves no further thought. It’s such a powerful sound that it’s easy to envision a song like this becoming a lesser band’s only hit, sometime in the spring of 1987, to be longingly relistened to for decades thereafter by a few thousand loyal fans, wishing more people had remembered it. But this is Roxette, and even though I love this song, evidently it hasn’t even made my top 100 (though I do, of course, also wish more people listened to this song). I’m not really looking for moderation in explaining why I love the songs on this list, so be ready, folks, because it keeps getting even better from here on.