This Year: 2017

"This Year" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song from one year of my life. See the introduction for more.

I edited SF and Fantasy books for more than a decade: I love a good apocalypse, and a good mythological reference. My song for 2017 has both of those.

This time out, I want to talk about Ragnarok by Charming Disaster.

It is what it says it is: a musical retelling of the Norse myth of Ragnarok - familiar to my generation from the legends of Don Blake and his alter ego - in a basically straightforward and myth-appropriate way. It gets big, because it's about the end of the world.

(Close readers may have noticed that a lot of these songs "get big" - well, the songs you remember for a long time, that are important and special. are going to be the ones that demand a lot and stake out a lot of ground, aren't they?)

Charming Disaster is another one of those bands with two singers, male and female, which is something that is absolutely lightning in a bottle when it works well. (Richard and Linda Thompson, for example. Closer to now, The Indelicates. Sometimes Low. And so on.) Charming Disaster songs regularly see the two of them trading lines back and forth, and that works brilliantly here.

maybe the wolves will eat the moon and the sun 
and we won’t have to face the consequences of the things we’ve done 

It's personal, too - this isn't just something happening, it's happening to these two characters, who have their own reasons for wanting or fearing the world to end.

go out and buy some cigarettes cause what the fuck 
you might as well enjoy yourself till ragnarok ragnarok

It's not my philosophy of life - oh, I appreciate it, but I never have or could live that way. But it's a great musical philosophy of life, and it rocks here. And that's all you need: a clever idea, good music, all done well.