Bob Dylan's straight-on delivery of crooked, impressionistic lyrics, the warm weariness of the Velvet Underground's self-titled third album, and the lazy anthems of Pavement. In short: big-budget feeling, played with shoestring ambition. What makes it sound fresh isn't that it faithfully imitates the past, but that it somehow fails to-- a product of alluringly broken logic.
Listeners coast-to-coast will no doubt notice the jab "There's no need to be an asshole/ You're not in Brooklyn anymore", but the lyrical heart of the song comes later: "You think it's over, oh you think it's over / To be someone who smokes pot in the subway with me", a semi-desperate diss from an old friend who can't see how things really are in part because they can't let go of how they were. Awkward nostalgia is a good subject for a band whose music sounds like it traveled decades to get here and got roughed up every step of the way.
I'm sending you this photograph
Of me in my new car
But I hate to say I miss you
'Cause you don't need me anymore
You politely say, "I miss you"
But we know you don't mean that anymore
Like when the doctor thought he caught you
Then you weaseled through the door
Through the door of consciousness
San Francisco
Oh you think it's over
Oh you think it's over to need
Someone who smokes pot in the subway
Pot in the subway, to me
Oh, Destructo, you're so destructive
Oh, you're so destructive to me
No destruction in the waking hour
No destruction in the waking wind
No destruction in the waking hour
There's no corruption in the waking wind
I'm talking to my grandma who lost her arms in the war
The aliens and armory that bombed her cigar store
Now you think that I don't know but I know you to know quite well
That I caught you sipping milkshakes in the parlor of the hotel
There's no need to be an asshole, you're not in Brooklyn anymore
You may take what you are given but you leave it on the floor
And I know they're gonna try to take my big mouse
Take the panels off my greenhouse
Oh, but the door of consciousness isn't open anymore
Oh you think it's over, oh, you think it's over to me
Someone who smokes pot in the subway
Pot in the subway with me
Oh Destructo, you're so destructive
Oh, you're so destructive to me
No destruction in the waking hour
No destruction in the waking wind
There's no destruction in the waking hour
There's no corruption on the mountain hour
No destruction in the waking hour
No destruction in the waking wind
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