24. NUDE - “California”

Part of me wants to say this song contains one of the greatest musical moments in 2015, and another part of me wants to insist on how ridiculous the previous statement is.

The entire song is stuffed full of beautiful muddled goodness. It’s a reverb drenched stroll through a sunny haze that leaves the listener swimming within a world that never fully clarifies. It’s a world of indeterminate edges, with sounds blurring and bleeding into one another the very moment they leak into existence, and it’s from the depths of this haze that the previously mentioned moment occurs. Shortly after the one minute mark a warped and mumbled flow suddenly condenses into existence, ushering in a moment of sheer musical bliss.

I cant quite explain it, but it’s a moment akin to one of those brief effervescent moments of beauty, when everything coalesces and you find yourself feeling completely and utterly happy. But it’s a happiness seemingly without cause. You can’t quite describe why you’re happy, you just are. For a brief instance your soul is beaming, shot clear through with a white light that momentarily makes every dark and shadowy crevice disappear, stuffing everything with beauty until you cant even remember why you ever feel bad to begin with.

It’s a teasing beauty though, because then it crumbles, fizzling out of existence as quickly as it appeared. It’s gone - dried up by the kinetic energy of a happiness too powerful and unstable to persist. So instead it swallows itself whole. Either that, or reality has improvised - finding a way to obscure the light and smother you once again with haze of your menial everyday existence. Suddenly you remember a worry, and you’re dragged outside the moment, with  the baggage of the past catching up or the future looming ahead. The clarity of the moment is gone, and even though you don’t really know what it was, you’re happy that it existed, and the feeling motivates you to search for its elusive nature once again.