PB&Jams: The Airborne Toxic Event
While almost all songs have a chorus, some of the best ones don’t.
Two notable tracks lacking a chorus are “The Gambler” by fun. and “Sometime Around Midnight” by The Airborne Toxic Event.
Quite frankly, I can’t even begin to explain my deep-rooted love for “The Gambler” in this 500-word post. So rather than attempting what simply cannot be done (note: this is still the plan for achieving everything that needs to get done before finals), I’m turning my attention to the chorus-less masterpiece “Sometime Around Midnight.”
Formed in 2006, The Airborne Toxic Event is an indie-rock band from Los Angeles. You may recognize the single “Changing” off the 2011 album “All at Once,” which was featured in “Gossip Girl.”
“Sometime Around Midnight,” tells the mesmerizing story of a man running into his ex one fateful night. The song is written entirely in second person, with “you” as the subject resulting in a simultaneously accusatory yet sympathetic tone.
A modern twist on the traditional “once upon a time” fairytale, the song begins with the intro, “And it starts, sometime around midnight, or at least that’s when you lose yourself for a minute or two.”
The protagonist stands by the bar and sees his ex — “The piano is this melancholy soundtrack to her smile / and that white dress she’s wearing, you haven’t seen it for a while.”
In a classic exhibit of false indifference he notes, “You know that she’s watching / she’s laughing she’s turning, she’s holding her tonic like a cross.”
The woman approaches him and asks how he is, the smell of her perfume bringing flashbacks of them together and in that moment, “You feel hopeless and homeless and lost in the haze of the wine.”
The story builds to a dramatic peak when, “she leaves, with someone you don’t know/ but she makes sure you saw her / she looks right at you and bolts.” The music reaches a dissonant climax with, “Your friends say, ‘What is it? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’”
It ends with a driving repetition of “You just have to see her / you just have to see her / you just have to see her you know that she’ll break you in two” and a concluding guitar riff that leaves you feeling as if you, like the protagonist, are wandering the streets heartbroken.
Listen to it herebut I beg you not to watch it — just another classic example of song > music video.