Melvin Backman

Bloodstain, by UNKLE

UNKLE's Psyence Fiction is not happy music. It is an intense, passionate musical journey through the darkness of anger and despair. Listen to it on a rainy, cold night. You will get it.

Without a powerful video like "Rabbit in Your Headlights" or powerful lyrics like Kool G Rap's go on

"Guns Blazing," one song, "Bloodstain," still manages to reach into my heart and rip it in half with every fresh listen. The tune's chorus, which opens with "blood stain/on a blue vein," immediately conjures images of suicide. My affinity for the song comes not from some morbid fascination with my own death, but something deeper.

To me, the song is a testament to fluidity and the beauty of escape. DJ Shadow paints a desolate landscape; he twists keyboards and morphs guitar riffs to create a strange, surreal environment in which Alice Temple's vocals slice especially deep. A strange, ghostlike bassline squirms in the background like the wind in a dark alley. The drums are hard and patterned with a hip hop sensibility what is otherwise a very weightless song. The drums themselves, however, maintain a certain air of unpredictability. They hesitate in spots. In others, they speed up or slow down almost without warning. The song is very alive and very bleak. It is the soundtrack to an escapist's melancholy.

"Bloodstain" taps something deep inside me. I often feel that my identity exists in some sort of fluid space between lots of other, more solid identities and constructs. Although centered on heartbreak, the lyrics somehow connect to the frequent anxiety and alienation that I feel trying to live life in-between. A sample in the song croons, "I'm alone/And dissatisfied/And someone else is alone/And dissatisfied." In that desperation, a quick escape is often ideal. Not necessarily something so dramatic as taking a blade to my wrists, but my need to occasionally isolate myself and find solace in my self-consciousness easily comes to mind when I hear this song.