Cathy Davey - End of the End
Final track from “The Nameless” (2010)
1. “End of the End” has no introduction. Instead, it’s got the sound of letting air out of something inflated: two streams twirling down around one another until they’re lost in the atmosphere. It’s the sound that remains once the organs of prior track “Universe Tipping” fade, the choir departs and the drums beat no more; it’s what’s left after maximalism maxes itself out. Cathy Davey is singing this, but that’s the wrong verb. She’s letting these sounds float away on their own accord. You might call her vocals “ghostly,” but it wouldn’t be a ghost like you’re imagining, a figure, but a chill in the room coming from somewhere you can’t see. Her voice is full of personality everywhere else on the album, straining and defiant even when the lyrics call for it not to be. This is the first time she sounds nameless.
2. The album’s name, of course, is The Nameless, which doubles as the non-name of its central character. It came out in 2010, and I loved it then, but it took me 2011 to understand it. That is to say, I probably don’t. Here’s Cathy, in her own words, in a (paywalled) Hot Press interview:
It’s about a woman who has lost her identity, through losing someone that she loved, because that’s what I was going through. And it was far easier projecting it onto this other woman, I didn’t feel like I was vomiting my own emotion onto people, that would not sit well with me.
Not all of this is pertinent to me. The Nameless is about death, something those I know have been fortunate enough to avoid so far. It’s downright insulting to say I understand the album. But I can’t undo my associations. I can’t rearrange my listening last year. And if you’re going to project your emotion onto anyone, a fictional character on a concept album is fairly safe. That’s how I listen to music, at least; it’s how I write about it, because it’s a convenient remove. If you want to know me, listen to this, as they say.
3. Anyway. We’re identifying with this other woman, dressing up with her in so many musical styles and responding to loss in so many ways. You could mourn with folk, as in the title track; you could reflect then mourn with bedroom production, as in “Happy Slapping.” You can be bitter and cabaret, as in “Army of Tears.” You can be burlesque and seek substitutes, like lovers (“The Touch”) or drink (“Wild Rum”). Sometimes, the substitutes seem to work. You can find true love and ballads, as in “Lay Your Hand,” the third-to-last track and a love song stunning in its finality, even more when you learn Cathy’s partner Neil Hannon arranged its string swells. It’s a perfect closing track. You can find catharsis and sing hymns, as in “Universe Tipping”: “With the world conspiring to make you hard, who’d be so foolish as to cry? Only a rebel would.” Your voice will swell and multiply and soar thousands of miles until whatever’s beneath is less than a speck. It’s also a perfect closing track, a perfect denouement. But it is not an epilogue.
4. “End of the End” is in 12/8 time everywhere but the verses, which are in 11/8 — one beat missing. It disorients you. You might have been able to waltz to it, but all you can do is stumble and be jostled through. There’s barely any music to ease you; for all the gentle or cheerful details — quietly picked guitar, piano chimes, a practically jaunty backup chorus on verse two — it’s like the song’s missing or deflated. That’s how Cathy sings it, anyway. She tiptoes through the lyrics, every line inflected like a question, and her voice doesn’t navigate the chord and time changes as much as get blown into them. There’s the tiniest brash inflection, the slighest melisma, but she’s so faint you’d have to listen closely. Or maybe there’s a dash at the end of her words, not a question mark: “I’m on the wind — looking down the end of the end — will it go easy, it go easy on me?” This is not resolution; it’s the opposite. An album’s worth of reactions, and still nothing’s certain.
5. We reviewed The Nameless’s big single, “Little Red,” on the Singles Jukebox as my 2010 Amnesty Week pick, and people called it a cautionary tale, victim-blaming even. I don’t hear it that way. Yes, Cathy sings “don’t you let him walk you home — there’s mischief in his makeup, you’re better off to do that walk alone,” spitting out “that walk” because she knows you know what walk she means. But “Little Red” comes after two related tracks: “In He Comes,” the year’s best crush song and one with the lyric “I’d give you all a body could receive,” then “Habit,” in which she does so to him and, after he leaves and is heard from no more, others. “Leave your keys out in the door as you leave,” she sings, “so next in line can creep inside easily.” If that was too subtle, that’s just chorus one; all subsequent choruses, and every chorus live, amends this to “so next in line can creep inside me easily.”
This generally doesn’t work. That is to say, perhaps it works for you; it doesn’t for her. She knows this — there’s as much tentative anxiety in “In He Comes” as actual crushing (which is why it’s so good), and “Habit” sounds like the soundtrack you’d write for a Tennessee Williams noir, self-aware and miserable. By “Little Red,” this has all reached its inevitable letdown. Cathy’s called the song a joke about how scared we allow ourselves to get when we’re alone. Don’t let him in, walk everywhere alone, don’t sleep (because you can’t at night.) None of these are recommendations, exactly: it’s self-talk. Her door was never locked until one day a trigger came cocking.
In other words, it never says what “End of the End” does: “women, beware! When you build your house on the air, it’ll blow away.” Much more general, much less problematic, but just as disturbing. The first line is nearly a yelp, and the last line is weightless. It’s like she’s drifting away halfway through the warning.
6. The chorus, though, is deceptively peaceful. The waltz actually works like a waltz this time, the background vocals cushion instead of haunt, and the words are deceptively hopeful: “Oh, we row and we row, and we gather the road to the end of the end. Oh, the pressure is low — ah, but the spirit is high, so the end of the end we go.” These are words for cheery-to-cheesy montages, not reflections on loss.
It’s a trick a lot of artists use. Since this is OWOB, and since my artist was Stina Nordenstam (that’s not quite a stretch; I first got into Irish music through her), I’ll cite one of her songs: “The Diver,” which soothes you with a warm bath and blanket-hug of a chorus when it’s not pummeling you with deliberate dissonance. And “End of the End” might sound pleasant here, but the chorus still ends in a minor key.
7. I’ve listened to the final half of this song so many times this year, and I still can’t figure out whether “rowing your own heart away” is supposed to be hopeful or hopeless. Hopeful: that’s where the track swells up, chiming piano and wall of sound and crashing percussion and a billion vocal lines; hopeless: those voices seem to be protesting or wailing as much as exulting, and all the swell recedes to nothing without ever resolving itself. Hopeful: she’s rowing her own heart, not anyone else’s; hopeless: she’s rowing it away, into the sunset probably, out of sight. Hopeful: the chorus preceded it; hopeless: everything else preceded it.
Maybe it’s both. She’s rowing away, never to be found, and she’s still not quite got an identity, but she’s spoken and we’ve listened. If “End of the End” were the epilogue of a book, it’d be the ambiguous kind; if it were the final scene of a movie, it’d be a fade to black. I don’t mind these sort of endings when they work: when they complicate things, when there’s no good, tidy resolution, and when no other ending is really possible. “End of the End” is all three.
The first few times I heard The Nameless, the last half bugged me: why are there three closing tracks? Why not end on “Lay Your Hand,” the final love song? Or even “Universe Tipping,” the final bit of character development? They’d both make perfect sense as endings for fiction. They’d work too well, in fact. There’s one more way to look at the last words of the song, as a gerund. “Rowing your own heart away” is something that just keeps repeating itself, so often and so many ways. You row and you row, and you gather the road. It’s the only way to end.
— Katherine St Asaph
(Katherine previously wrote for OWOB about Stina Nordenstam)
