I don't know what the ratio actually is, but there seems to be a fair amount of songs that deal with both sides of the human courting ritual. On one side, you have all the upbeat songs addressing the heady promise of attraction, flirtation, seduction, lust and romance, and on the other side, the melancholic, angry and hurt lamentations addressing the pain of heartbreak, loneliness, betrayal and the burden of unrequited feelings. While the epitome of the genre is probably Aretha Franklin's 'I Will Survive', recent artists like Adele, Sam Smith and Lana Del Rey have also carved out hugely influential musical careers by addressing the darker side of human interdependence.
‘High Road’, a track from New York indie band Cults’ second album Static (2013), is a relatively unknown potent excavation of the trauma of separation. Instead of dwelling in nostalgia or bitterness, the track’s chorus maturely accesses the speaker’s and lover’s inability (possibly due to mutual immaturity) to make their relationship work, or to end things amicably:
“But I should've took the high road
Now it's such a long way back
Instead I took the low road
Figured out it's something
You can't take back
Should've took the high road
Now my days have all turned black
Instead I took the low road
Figured out it's something
That we both lack”
There are many love duets, but hardly ever any divorce duets. ‘High Road’ isn’t a proper duet, but it almost approximates one, with guitarist Brian Oblivion shadowing lead singer Madeline Follin’s vocals whenever the chorus plays. While the song’s verses addresses the distance and alienation that the female speaker feels from her now estranged lover ('Every time you leave here/ I'm keeping quiet/ I guess that's all you want from me), the chorus presents a mutual awareness of each other’s culpability in the situation they both find themselves in. There are no sordid details of how both parties took the ‘low road’ to get where they are now, just a candid and distanced assessment of the choices they made and the consequences they are now living with.
The track’s poetic finality and sombre assessment of an internal psychic landscape is visually enhanced by the accompanying black-and-white music video, replete with a mounted stag head and a vintage car that both burst into flames at the end of the video, shadows, moths, a spiral staircase, a dark tunnel and wallpapers that seem to double as a Rorschach test: a befitting epilogue, eulogy and epitaph for the death of a romance.
