Remember Me Lover//Porcupine Tree//The Incident//September 14th 2009

When people ask me a song for a breakup, I’d never imagine that my top choice would a song named,”Remember Me Lover”. One would assume, from the title, to remember someone for all the good times, why else would you write a song about it? Although this song is far off from being of the punk rock genre, for me punk is about managing to make the listeners feel something, in the depth of their hearts. This song manages to fill me up with contrasting emotions of immense rage and reverence, due to the realistic manner in which a psychopathic person talks of his wrong-doings in a quite matter-of-fact manner. It’s kind of unnerving to hear a love that goes so terribly wrong, that the narrator thinks he was probably asleep through it.

Of course, I don’t believe one has to be psychotic to relate to this song because sometimes love destroys our ability to maintain a certain amount of civility. There is a fine line between love and hate, both include passion and one can transcend from emotion to another, without much difficulty. Perhaps, it’s something a person may ido out of spite, to someone they consider to be toxic in their life. I don’t know if I can effectively pen down what this song does to me, on a psychological level. I can literally feel my stomach churning with like anger and my brain just whizzing at the excellent use of music to create a deeper impact of the words. It starts off slow and peaceful, perhaps the way any kind of form of separation does, but slowly starts manifesting into something ugly and angry. We use rage as a form of letting go, demeaning everything about our significant other, allowing the ugly to blind side ourselves from the beauty.

This is a song like no other. The lack of pretension and sugar-coated words might strike one as  kind of heartless, and that’s what I perceived it as, until I began to pay closer attention to the song. The rawness of the emotions which are being expressed really make this one of my favorite songs, in terms of how divergent it is in terms of themes. The strong use of guitar in the bridge seems to symbolize the anger which was boiling, however it manages to calm down, again. However, this is not a song that talks about the stages of separation; it shows how relationships begin to unravel, how familiarity angers him, how differences are not being resolved, how words just seems to anger each other. Porcupine tree is quite an acquired taste, due to the depth in their lyricism and complexity in the instruments used. However, as I started to delve deeper into that music genre, i realised that the depth lacked pretense; it wasn’t forced, which made it even more authentic. I think we’ve all felt the need to make a choice between gracefully letting go or tormenting and destroying the person who did the same to us. Maybe what I appreciate is that the narrator had the strength to make a choice I never could.