Alpha Incipiens

062. Orange Ball of Love

Alex Russell Zopilote Machine , , , , , , , ,

In “Orange Ball of Love” one lover finally gives up and gets serious about the confrontation he’s been avoiding.

Track: “Orange Ball of Love”
Album: Zopilote Machine (1994)

There are four “Orange Ball” songs: Love, Hate, Peace, and Pain. “Peace” and “Hate” both have really solid jokes in them and they’re funny songs. “Pain” is, predictably, very sad. “Orange Ball of Love” is more difficult to diagnose. The four songs are tied together only by naming convention, and John Darnielle has said that they aren’t meant to be connected any other way. Rather than comparing it with the other three, it’s better to look at “Orange Ball of Love” as a part of the album Zopilote Machine. It’s a really angry album, which isn’t surprising given songs titles like “Standard Bitter Love Song #7” and “We Have Seen the Enemy,” but “Orange Ball of Love” is interesting beyond the anger.

It opens with some twangy guitar and John’s familiar snarl in the line “when I catch sight of your face.” By the end of the stanza the narrator is trying to find “a good place to hide.” He accuses his target of “wearing a wire.” It goes beyond figurative language to the point where you have to consider that this may be a person confronting an actual enemy. Lots of Goats songs are about lovers in their darkest moments, but the confrontation is rarely this dramatic.

Whether you think it’s figurative or not isn’t really important. The language is severe enough that either works. When the sun sets it sets into a “burial ground.” When it rises it “rears up” and “swallows” the couple. These are people in a standoff and the narrator has decided he’s going to come clean about how he feels about all this. You feel the corner he’s in, even if you’ve never had to accuse someone of giving you a fake name like this guy does.

037. Alpha Incipiens

Alex Russell Zopilote Machine , , , , , , , , ,

The first song about The Alpha Couple shows that the iconic lovers weren’t ever all that great for each other.

Track: “Alpha Incipiens”
Album: Zopilote Machine (1994)

Every song about The Alpha Couple is fascinating. The timeline is fun to try to figure out, but you can’t do it for certain. You can figure out that some have to happen before others based on geography — they start on the west coast and end in Florida — but beyond that it’s all conjecture. In that way The Alpha Couple is less a story to be uncovered and labelled and more the ultimate idea of two people crashing and burning when combined.

When you listen to the spite on “Oceanographer’s Choice” you feel like the hate is so bitter and so real that the love must have been some serious business. Anyone who learns to hate that hard has to have loved even harder, right? Well, the timeline may be up for debate, but The Alpha Series has a definite start and a definite end. Their final song (chronologically) is “Alpha Omega,” and by then they’re down to just one of them. Their first song is “Alpha Incipiens” from Zopilote Machine, and that’s been confirmed. That much, John Darnielle says, he’ll give you.

Are they in love in “Alpha Incipiens?” The fast-paced, screaming song tells the drunken tale of one of them trying to understand the other as the drinks begin to flow. They will get drunk and they will get desperate as their story unfolds, but it starts with simple, ice-cold vodka and “the only thing I know is that I love you // and I’m holding on.”

It really foretells Tallahassee and the oncoming trainwreck very well. Even on one of their first mornings — and in their first tale — the couple gets drunk and has trouble talking to each other. Communication will become the least of their problems.