Steal Smoked Fish b/w In the Shadow of the Western Hills

Steal Smoked Fish b/w In the Shadow of the Western Hills

Released: 2015
Label: Merge

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Lyrics only — sorry!

Apologies, but I haven't had the chance to annotate this album yet — if you'd like to help, please email me! This page is just a placeholder so that you can read the lyrics. Full annotations, liner notes, and the rest will come when the page is fully annotated.

Liner notes

transcendental records 001
a division of MERGE RECORDS

Steal Smoked Fish b/w In the Shadow of the Western Hills is the bonus EP that came with early preorders of Transcendental Youth.

Table of contents

  1. Steal Smoked Fish
  2. In the Shadow of the Western Hills

Steal Smoked Fish

"Not quite. Two, three, and."

Across the Burnside bridge before
Anyone shot their movies there
We hid from the whipping rain
When we had run out of cocaine
Dispatch down to Plaid Pantry
Two on point, and two on sentry
Ah, the joys that the lesser days bring
Make you throw back your heads and sing

God bless all petty thieves
With tins of oysters up their sleeves
Feast when you can
And dream when there's nothing to feast on

Across a different bridge today
Over the river and down Broadway
Feels so good to have you here
Some of you will be dead next year
I see your destinies above you
Like angels who don't love you
Let them kiss you and hold you tight
As long as the money's right

God bless all my old friends
And god bless me too, why pretend?
Feast when you can
And dream when there's nothing to feast on

God bless the guys from my old neighborhood
Gone past the point where any blessings can do them any good

Attach the C-4 where you must
Disappear in a cloud of dust
But spare a thought for what it covers up
Pour a triple and raise your cup
We were here once, me and my friends
But we destroyed all of the evidence
And vanished into the night
At least we got that one right

God bless us, all of us
We who learn to shun the light
God bless all vampires every night
Feast when you can
Feast when you can
Feast when you can
Feast when you can

In the Shadow of the Western Hills

Spread out the old maps on the floor
Plot the course of the infection
Trace from its beginnings to the present
Is there no one here who's making this connection
Feral cats out by the trash cans
To the true believer, everything's a sign

Scrape the pigments from the baseboards
In the shadow of the western hills
And paint my vision on my body
In the shadow of the western hills

Bleak rose-petaled sky in two dimensions
Black treeline a blade that cuts across it all
Can't seem to sleep or find my appetite
Since I got home from the hospital
Call up Rebecca, maybe try to explain
But she hangs up while I'm still talking, I walk out into the rain

Wonder from the alley to the darkness
Sink down completely, leave no trace
Trapped beneath the surface of the ice again
Lie still with the moonlight on my face
Wait for the wolves to keep their promise
Listen for their footfalls on the snow

I can't hear things clearly to be honest
In the shadow of the western hills
He gets most healed that waits the longest
In the shadow of the western hills

Credits

Many thanks to Wil Hall, who transcribed this EP along with Transcendental Youth.

To Caliclimber, the one, the only, to whom I am eternally indebted for his superb Flickr album from which the album art for this page arises.

Footnotes

maybe someday