Circuit Des Yeux – My Name Is Rune

I go through it every year, and this year is no different: right now, I’m on the 2013 Missed Music Apology Tour.  Keeping up with new music is like drinking water through a fire hose, so lots inevitably gets by me.  This is why, as tacky as they may be, I enjoy comprehensive annual best-of lists.  It’s a way for me to retcon my music knowledge/relevance/hipness/whatever for a given year.  One of my key oversights from 2013 was Circuit Des Yeux’s album Overdue.  This album, in a word, broods.  Haley Fohr’s unwaveringly haunting voice cuts clear through the songs’ varied instrumentation: strings, guitars of the acoustic and distorted electric varieties, synths, and so on.

“My Name Is Rune” is probably my favorite song off of Overdue.  There are so many different elements within this song–the simple folk riff, the tribal drumming, the otherworldly organ–and Fohr’s lamenting vocal delivery is its own constant.  The disconcertingly vague and alien lyrics are consistent with the song’s mystical tone:

My name you do not know
When you saw me I was not there
When you knew me I was not there
My name is rune and I live on the moon
I do not wish to live in this world anymore

Since this is the Missed Music Apology Tour (and neither the first nor the last), I would like to take this opportunity to formally apologize to Circuit des Yeux:

Overdue was one of the most moody, stylistically and instrumentally diverse, emotionally stirring, and, from my music journalist standpoint, adjective-rich albums of last year.  It’s been getting some decently heavy rotation from me this past week.  Yet I blew it in 2013.  I let Overdue slip past me.  That’s actually being generous; I was completely oblivious to it.  That’s my takeaway for 2014: don’t miss out on great albums, dummy.  I’m grateful to have stumbled across your album and even more so that I have this platform on which to promote it.  I just wish I got to it sooner, and for that let me say I’m sorry.

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