Well it will be the Earth that’s dying if Bill Gates gets his way and dims the Sun and I think I’d be a little more concerned with that imminent eventuality than the prospect of this planet getting too hot to live on in a few millennia or so.
And what happened to the returning Ice Age that was popular a few years ago? That’s been quietly swept under the carpet. Or the fact that the supposedly shrinking Antarctic has added an extra two billion tonnes of ice in the last few years?
As regular readers will know (we do have a few left!) I don’t buy into the climate hysteria. We’re going through a period of warmer than average weather, that’s it. I’m old enough to remember the Summer of ’76 in the UK where the average daily/nightly temperature didn’t dip below 30 Celsius for two months solid, the reservoirs dried up and the roads melted.
And in Paris it is claimed it reached 50 Degrees for weeks in the 18th Century and no-one knows why although that’s another little tit bit that has been expunged from the records.
However, I don’t deny time and space to those that hold an alternative view, we’ve hosted many of them before now, and Copenhagen’s HalfCutLemon is the latest one.
They’ve been around since 2017, when they released their punk/psychedelic influenced debut EP, ‘This Galaxy Is Ours’ and in 2022 the single ‘Desert Sun’ coincided with the 75th anniversary of the Roswell ‘aliens’ incident.
So the astronomical allusions are already well ingrained.
The same year they released their album ‘Oh No It’s U-Love!’ which confirmed a more experimental approach to music making.
They have become known as genre blenders (I must get some new glasses, I almost wrote that as gender benders) which I’m glad to read because I wouldn’t be able to classify them for all the tea in China.
‘The Sun is Dying’ is their second standalone single from a forthcoming album, ‘This Ain’t Real’ and is touted as “a chilling wake-up call for a planet in crisis”, referencing both environmental and political turmoil and what they call “existential threats.”
To be frank I only know of two countries facing an existential threat right now but it is intriguing that the song had been released (27th June) during a period in which tensions have ratcheted up in both cases and may be about to come to a head in the week in which I write this.
So it is timely and relevance matters a great deal in this business, even if this song was originally written years ago. What really matters is the here and now.
When Zager & Evans released ‘In the year 2525 (Exordium & Terminus)’ in 1969 it was three months before Man first landed on the Moon (to claim it for America), the Cold War was frozen solid and the Summer of Love was coming to an end, forever.
Even though we’d survived the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, going into the 1970s the outlook was bleak and Zager & Evans’ song caught the public mood perfectly as it ranged over not only the clear and present danger of right now but also the unknown unknowns of the future, in which man’s thoughts, relationships and body would be negatively impacted by technological advances and ending with man’s extinction.
Which makes it every bit as accurate, so far at least, as Orwell’s 1984.
So, does ‘The Sun is Dying’ carry the same gravitas as that song, or indeed of Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘The Sound of Silence’ which it samples in the very first line along with the tune, going on to suggest that S&G’s ‘Old friend’ – the breakdown and alienation of society – has happened already; indeed “he came to see me last weekend.”
I would argue that it does, as it goes on to conjure up a super dystopian vision of the tree of life fast shedding its leaves as, inter alia, the mob gains control; false gods and prophets emerge; the un-empowered flee to the caves if they can; while the oligarchs party on.
Rome falls again. Do we ever learn?
It’s your worst nightmare, encapsulated in just four minutes, the time an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile takes from launch to hitting its target.
And it is made even more compelling by the vocal delivery of Jesper Christiansen, who channels both Bowie and Peter Gabriel so well that I’m starting to think that prog comeback really is on the cards.
You’ll need to listen to it a couple of times to get the full impact, after which you won’t stop.
HalfCutLemon is:
Vocal & Keyboards: Jesper Christiansen
Drums: Jacob Birck Laustsen
Bass: Flemming Steen Andersen
Guitar: Sigurd (Sigi) Kramer Hansen.
Find them on:
Website: https://halfcutlemon.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HalfCutLemon
Bandcamp (track): https://halfcutlemon.bandcamp.com/track/the-sun-is-dying
