Oh shucks, Leslie Neilsen has died. For someone who has spent a lifetime appreciating the truly stupid things in life – an outlook honed through many, many childhood re-watchings of various Leslie Neilsen films, this is a disaster.
The joy in watching, say Police Squad, was his ultra-deanpan manner whilst all around him was awash with farce. And here, dear reader, is were we crowbar a tenuous link to rock music into the article.
Despite much evidence to the contrary – mainly supplied by the likes of My Chemical Romance – a serious outlook can sometimes work in music. But it’s a sheet-ice-thin façade that can shatter at any ill-advised moment.
Dolls by Bleeding Heart Narrative
Bleeding Heart Narrative sure sound like they ought to be a serious band, don’t they? And Dolls, a careful, sparse, tender song would back up that assessment. The song is wordless, and feels like a coda to a song that has never existed – almost an afterthought, albeit one that swells beautifully and ends with a beautiful flourish.
Wordless songs fall into two categories – the wholly dispensable, or the utterly necessary. Dolls, gentle and sinewy, falls into the latter.
The difficulty is that now I’m picturing Bleeding Heart Narrative getting up to all sorts of zany japes, as if to mentally disprove any thoughts I had of po-facedness. Heck, I bet they’re playing reciting lines from The Naked Gun to one another right now. Surely not.