Powdered Sugar
Pop, 2022
I confess that I never cared for Savage Garden, and didn’t pay too much attention to Darren Hayes’s solo career as a result. Perhaps it is a nice kind of karmic jab between my eyes, therefore, when I first hear Feels Like It’s Over, the latest single from his fifth solo effort Homosexual, I find myself rooted on the spot as I become lost in the music and the story.
Musically, it’s tad clichéd as music for the happy people as I can easily imagine it coming from Erasure or Sam Smith when the latter was still somewhat sane, but my god, the verse and the chorus and especially the bridge all come together to rip out my heart and stomp it to mulch.
The story, oh, the story.
It feels like it’s over
But nobody’s leaving
There’s so much love left
So why am I grieving
It’s about the collapse of a loving relationship, not because of drama, but because somehow the people involved just drift apart and lose interest.
It’s so polite and that’s what’s breaking my heart
Because we don’t even fight for it
We don’t even break a sweat
I hear this while waiting at the grocery check-out line, and I find myself choking up a little. Simple words, in simple lines, and yet they hit so hard.
We don’t even scream or cry but baby there was a time
When baby you and I
We would have died defending this love
We would have died for it
We would have died defending it
We would have died
Later, at home, I listen to it again, and my eyes tear up a bit. The song is already killing me inside, but this part gets me to wipe at my cheeks a bit because dang, those few tears start to fall.
When I was young
I guess it fulfilled me emotionally
To give myself away
That selfless act was not as noble as it first seemed
It tethered you to me
Then, I catch the music video for this song, and I lose it. It’s the worst kind of breakup: there are no villains and no heroes, just love that withers from complacency and being taken for granted, until one day you realize that familiarity and habit have bled into contempt, the relationship is a dead weight causing you to slowly suffocate. You desperately want things to go back the way they were… but you don’t know how.
Oh god, this song. The feels, and the pulsing kind of dead, numbed pain in the heart.
Hence, when I listen to Homosexual, Mr Hayes’s “I’m free and I’m me, and I’m sharing the real me to everyone!” album, the first single Let’s Try Being in Love takes on a rather tragic tinge, as it can very well be the prequel that leads to the sad, sad story in Feels Like It’s Over. This song may feel like some vapid bop track, but it presents love as a vain and narcissistic concept that is all about validating one’s self worth.
Poison Blood is all about how love can slowly kills one from the inside, while the disco track All You Pretty Things is dedicated to the lives lost at the Pulse shooting. The latter may appear exploitative at first, but the song captures very nicely the nihilistic feeling of just living for the present.
The songs here feel very 1970s and 1980s, with full blown disco and New Romantics influences in most of the songs, and as someone that love these things, I’m not complaining. Homosexual (Act One) and Homosexual (Act Two) however take a little detour to a place where they won’t feel out of place in a bin of unused Michael Jackson and George Michael songs.
If I do have a complaint, it’s that Feels Like It’s Over makes the other songs feel banal and trivial in comparison. All the happier songs are prequels that will take me down the road to the heartbreak that is this song, and I find it a little harder to appreciate those songs as a result. That song is the one that causes the album to jump the shark, and I’m almost sad that I heard that song first. There’s a good reason why in the album that song is placed closed to the end!
Still, this is a solid album through and through. The album is all Darren Hayes, as his personal confession and expression as a gay man in his 50s, and it really shows.
Musically, it doesn’t break any new ground, but listening to it makes me acutely aware of how well it stirs up my emotions. That’s what I want from an album, and I can’t believe that an album by Darren Hayes can do that to me!
