This is the point in Truth Over Lies when it simply falls down. As though it were a burst of cold air on the San Francisco street at night--stingy, bitty, causing your chest to squeeze and your mind to rave. You can't look away. Michellar (Michelle Bond) and Frankie El have created something enormous, yet it does not scream, shout. It swells up like the Pacific, sweeping and crashing on the cliffs, desperate, unstoppable, alive, and, at the same time, tender.
Frankie El's voice--it soars. it crams in, it stuffs in the vacant areas of your heart. And yet, down beneath, is this faint pain. As though he has witnessed too many vows and pledges turn bad, dreams shatter and shatter, yet he cannot cease singing. The guitar sounds are like night lights of Twin Peaks shimmering, trembling, alive, and the drums are moving toward you like a heartbeat that you hadn't known you were missing--still, persistent, relentless, steady. All the harmonies seem to have hands stretched across boundaries and are shaking but clinging together like that to remind you that even hopelessness can breed rebellion.
And the movie panorama of it... God. it had been born in an Idyllwild trifle, sewed together in a world-spanning quilt--California drawings, South African vocals, Hollywood finishings--and it somehow moves, breathing, crossing boundaries, would not keep quiet. You get suggestions of U2 in his broad-screen hope, a hint of Coldplay in his tender tempests but Michellar retains it close to the bone, raw and trembling, close to humanity, pounding towards the present.
I've hit repeat too many times. With each hearing a lump in my throat and a smoldering fire in my chest. In such a noisy, half-truth, distractions world, Truth Over Lies is like a warm, steady, hand-cutting-through-the-mog world. Not a protest song, it is a reminder that we need to rise higher than the lies that attempt to diminish us. And now... it is like breathing again after breathing in too long.
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