‘Loose Ends’ is, at nine and a half minutes, the longest song that Forwardman (the band name of its leader Sakari Viittala) has ever written, which gives him a justifiable pride although he recognises with irony that, at that length, it was “destined to be a single.”
It is the last track on his vinyl album, ‘Stranded Future Soho Fugitive’, which was released in February and which gets the digital treatment in May.
Sakari is one of those generous types who send me their CDs and I’ve had the album in that format for a while. It gets played a lot in the car. For someone who has demonstrated a soft Brit Pop-like persona in the past there’s an underlying sense of drama and even darkness on this album, accompanied by a harder, rougher sound and vocal on several tracks.
On the sample track we looked at the opener, ‘Soho Fugitive’, set as it is in that particular Sodom and Gomorrah that is West Central London, and one replete with suggestive lyrics. It’s perfect for grinding your way through slow-moving city streets, conscious of the lurking menace just beyond your darkened windscreen.
This final track is different in nature, having been written in several separate parts. It is constructed in a quick fire rhyme rap style (but not the music that goes with it) and some of those rhymes are cute.
I profess I haven’t a clue what it is about. The best I can offer is that the ‘Loose Ends’ signify something akin to what Win Butler meant in Arcade Fire’s ‘Suburban War’ when he sang of the anguish of friends parting at the end of their schooldays, never to see each other again and how he “looks for you in every passing car”. “All my old friends, they don’t know me now; all my old friends staring through me now”, he laments.
The verse here,
“On the loose ends the summer is dressed up to the sky/I’m longing to the place where I was born
What it tells me I must face I never really made it through the storm
To all my dearest friends I´m lost I can´t explain the feeling I´ve been sent
Sometimes I wonder if I´m destined to the end/to see the sundown on the loose ends”,
Gives me a similar vibe.
Musically, it is less frenetic, more considered, than some of the other album tracks, more of the Lennon or Dylan in its composition to accompany those lyrics although it does liven up towards the end.
It’s one for playing when you’ve tired of mulling over the meaning of life and prefer to listen to it instead. It might just tie up a few loose ends for you.
Find him on:
Website: https://forwardmanmusic.com/home
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Forwardman-288309114060
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/forwardmanmusic/
