| And so after these movements, which have steadily been increasing the pressure, we’re given a fairly easy song. Its point (“We are the dollars and cents/We’re going to crack your little soul”) seems to be that the world is a bleak place governed by money. Sure: I mean, absolutely. If Propagandhi were making this point, it’d have some zing to it; if Phil Ochs were making it, it’d find a way to break your heart. But next to Amnesiac’s other revelations, it rings a little hollow. When the narrator attacked politicians in “You and What Army?” it was clear that he’d suffered some personal injury and wasn’t really interested in politics at all; there was something grand and pathetic about his lashing-out. “Dollars and Cents” doesn’t feel like that. It’s quite wonderful musically, with an hypnotic, water-logged bassline climbing an octave again and again like Sisyphus pushing his rock up the side of the mountain, and those absent-minded strummed guitars that gave “Knives Out” the waiting-for-something-bad-to-happen mood of a Hopper painting. And there are those drums, you know, echoing like a voices from a cave. They mark time with a rusty pocketknife. They lend to this particular song a feeling that no other song on the entire record has: an easy, breezy feeling. But overall it feels like nothing much is really happening. |