Separator
Studio Version -
From the Basement -
Cambridge Acoustic -
This song is in a strange spot for me right now. Foresight tells me it's a slow grower with high reward, maybe it's that I actually watched the From the Basement performance just now for the first time in months and was more engaged than I'd ever been with the song. I never noticed the rhythm guitar at the end is syncopating the chord sequence - Thom's propensity to do that should have been a dead giveaway, of course I only realized by watching him - his guitar is so affected it aurally comes across as as if weren't even strummed it all. Jonny and Ed's contributions toward the end promote the final meandering, undulating soundmass that draws from the same fever-dream of Meeting In The Aisle, bringing a dazzling close to an album that is tragically short, leaving many listeners (initially myself included) with a sense of false closure that does Separator no favors. Of course, it kinda shoots itself in the foot with the "If you think this is over then you're wrong" line at the end of an eight song album. How could you blame people for thinking there was gonna be a part two? Though its not as if Thom were wrong - Supercollider and The Butcher were released as a post-album offshoot and the revelatory From the Basement sessions reveal The Daily Mail and Staircase to be essential to the vitality of the perception of the album as a whole, which still only leaves one to wonder why TkoL proper resolves so soundly and convincingly on Separator without even having one of the four actual conflicted/frustrated songs to resolve from (TAMTW, Butcher, Staircase, Daily Mail). The high point of conflict on the album they gave us is Feral, and despite that songs remarkable build of energy and frenzied drum programming, the conflict it presents gets unwound in Lotus Flower, frozen underwater in Codex, and dies peacefully in Give Up The Ghost. Separator in context feels like a contented encore after the album ended on song seven after having forgotten what it was all worked up about three songs ago anyways.
And the From the Basement performance fixes this, both by achieving execution and slotting the song into a much more rewarding context, ironically Thom chose the songs placement merely as a response to the question "uh what haven't we played yet?". Perhaps his response carried some forethought, we'll never know for sure but its hard to argue with Separators place in the FTB performance as a midpoint between two halves of the album. It closes an arc in the first half and lyrically makes sense in the middle - the lines about being free of some great burden and a woman blowin his cover lead into Lotus Flower and out of Feral quite well (all three song that lyrically tie in to In Rainbows conflict of infidelity and love. Resolve to open relationship doesn't come more clearly than "I'm not yours and your not mine and that's all right please don't judge"). Phil and Clive keep it just like the album here - minimal variation on the beat and Colin is moving but staying directly at the center of focus around an uncharacteristically major setting.
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