angus and julia stone - silver coin

Normally, I don't posit myself as a fan of songs that are openly weepy. I like to think I left the Path of Least Emo Resistance when I left high school. Occasionally, though, there are songs whose lyrics manage to come off heartfelt and genuine without dropping into that Taylor Swift feeling of storybook love and yearning. It helps to have music behind the lyrics that just sounds wistful and heartsick, too.

Enter Angus & Julia Stone, an Australian brother-sister tandem who have released a surprising amount of music - two full-lengths and five EPs, plus contributions to other albums - for their relatively little pub. On "Silver Coin," from 2007's A Book Like This, we hear everything described above.

Violins tune, finish up, and give way to a soft-stringed acoustic guitar and a deliberately played string of piano notes. The start of the song seems like preparation for a dirge, a slow trudge. The first real surprise comes in the sweeping aside of that possibility when the drums come in. There's no real break. There's an almost uptempo feel to them, a snare that sounds like it wants to be reassuring in the face of the song's lyrics.

And lyrics like these, while not quite Matt Berninger levels of obscurely poetic yarns of adulthood and drunken pining, are well thought-out. This is a rational guy singing this song. I can't help but feel empathy for what's going on here: there's loss and the measured reaction that follows what was sure to have been a more kneejerk feeling of emptiness. There's a piece missing here, now, and it sure doesn't seem like that wound's quite healed.

If you can't draw a connection to what's happening in this song, the emotional meaning of it might become muddled; or worse, feel like it's unnecessary or anything less than honest. But this sounds like a combination of sound and calm fury that makes me feel like I totally understand what's going on here, and that's what makes it so effective.

Note: though the video goes longer, the song itself ends just before 5:00.