SABLE,, Zach

I don't want to listen to this album. "..." sounds very similar to the siren that brings all of Israel to a standstill on Holocaust Remembrance Day and on Memorial Day. On both those "holidays," a siren rings out for two minutes at a specific time in the morning, across the entire country, and the entire country comes to a halt. People stop walking and stand at attention. Everyone pulls over on the highway, stops their car, gets out, stands silently. Then, when the siren is over, everyone moves on with their life.

That siren is monotonal—it doesn't go up and down. That's in contrast to the emergency siren, which goes up and down in tone. I've been woken up by sirens like that this past Friday night, Monday night, and Tuesday night, because the Houthis in Yemen have decided to shoot ballistic missiles at Tel Aviv in the middle of the night. It's an experience to be woken from your sleep by a terrifying sounding siren, at 1:45 and 3:30 and 4:30 AM. It takes a second to realize what's going on. Then I jump out of bed. I try to find shorts to put on, Crocs too. And then I run down two flights of stairs to the shelter. People come in, quickly, slowly. We hear a boom, typically, which is the sound of the missile defense system trying to shoot down the ballistic missile. We wait ten minutes, to make sure we're clear of any falling shrapnel or falling rockets that weren't intercepted. If they hit our building and we're not in a shelter, we're probably dead. The missile from Friday night landed in a playground in Jaffa, four miles from my house, after it was only partially intercepted, and sixteen people were injured. After ten minutes, we try to go back upstairs and go back to sleep. But my heart is pounding. Monday night, I could go back to sleep, but Tuesday night I just stayed up after the 4:30 AM wakeup, and now I'm at work, typing this.

So I can barely listen to this album. The first song reminds me of sirens, which reminds me of the middle of the night warfare in my backyard. It's not normal, it's not how things should go. (Neither are mysterious drones flying above your house. How scary is it? Someone tell me.) I certainly don't want to listen to the first song of this album ever again. It makes my heart pound, and not in a good way. It makes me unsettled, like it's unfair for Vernon to just keep on singing these songs after throwing me for a loop like that. It colors the rest of the album for me. The songs are fine, I guess? I don't really care. I can't force my mind to focus on them.

What's Vernon trying to do with that first song? I don't think the sound of "..." is particularly pleasant and I don't think that even has to do with my own triggers. I also don't think it fits in with the rest of the album. It confuses me and messes me up.

Anyways, I feel like I hijacked this review because of my own stuff, which is maybe annoying. But this is it, this is the form it'll have.