The Paralytic from Mythic Hindsight by Day of Wrath
Three sets of basic chord changes (by the two minute mark you've heard them all,) made not-basic first by overlying vocals & solo melodies and then from underneath when the rhythm section takes the stage.
The lyrics are drawn from The Sisters, the first story in Joyce's Dubliners, which deals with a young boy's experience of the death of a marginally mental paralytic priest who in his retirement befriended and taught the boy Latin. The boy has a dream in which the priest confesses to him, the sin of simony, which you don't hear about much, it's the selling of ecclesiastical offices, and the boy “in a pleasant and vicious place” absolves the priest.
The album end-beginning, (Paralytic final chord to the first sonorities of track one,) is noteworthy. Don't listen on shuffle.
Specifics for the geeks in the audience: The album ends on a struck e minor 9, and begins on an arpeggiated c# minor extended to 7, 9, & 11, 11 being an f#, which is the 9 of the e minor ending the album. The g natural in the e minor chord becomes a g# in the opening, so there is the sense, when you start over, of going from minor to major, but obliquely, if not surreptitiously, because the new root, c#, redefines that g# as the 5th of a minor triad, which yet by virtue of its extensions (above noted) has the glimmer of a major sonority, its ambiguousness increased by its being arpeggiated.
Tracklist
| 10. | The Paralytic | 7:14 |
Lyrics
The window should have told me he was dead;
Two candles at a corpse's head.
Each day I softly said the word paralysis.
I feared as much as I longed to see its deadly work.
The gray face of the paralytic followed me to bed.
It desired to confess to me.
Its lips were moist, smiling continually.
By himself in the dark in his confession box,
There he sat wide awake, laughing to himself,
And that's when they knew, of course,
something was wrong with him.
In a pleasant and vicious place
I absolved the simoniac.
After James Joyce's “The Sisters”
PJCF 2024 May
