Dead in the Water - Forget Them Wendy
By Silva Shahini
Dead in the water – Rinse, Repeat, Resignation
The musical currents that flow through this piece allow a listener to revel in this specific process of sinking. The haunting vocals stretch over the riffing guitar to create this feeling of a person being constantly confronted by lapping waves, various mysterious tensions underfoot and erratic and unpredictable pulls that can come out of no-where in a body of water. The only thing that provides a sense of regularity is when the occasional pulsating percussion is able to push through the guitar and vocals to create this feeling of the person fighting back. ‘Dead in the Water’s’ complex sound exploring this feeling of human resistance by sonically demonstrating all of these different pulls in the water slowly overpowering and threatening the struggling human in question.
This depressing, chaotic feeling of trying to stay afloat and this romantic, numbing concept of drowning in water are both ideas that have been used time and time again in media and culture (think the Lady of Shallot, Ophelia, Titanic and even Noah’s Ark). But Forget Them Wendy’s -dive- into exploring this concept whilst still going against the current in order to delve deeper into the idea makes this song feel raw and fresh.
The slow start creates an aural representation of a person wading into shallow water and paddling along. As the song builds, this sound becomes more layered and intense as the person gets deeper into the water. At that point, the first period of struggle against the water (the chorus) comes in around the 0:44 second mark. The increase in volume and the sharp change into heavier guitar, heavier drums and more panicked vocals “I swim for the surface, and nothing could stop this…” explores a change in how the water is trying to sink this person and the person’s want to fight this. Once the person realises they’re “dead in the water” the music becomes less powerful and the person’s resolution fades. “I’ve been diving deeper down, tryna find the light…”. The energy continues to build as the instruments become louder again and the chorus kicks in again . After this eruption, another period of pained, oppressive calm comes about again until the thrashing chorus bursts through again. This cycle occurs three times in total throughout the song.
Forget Them Wendy utilises the cycles of a song structure to explore how cyclical human fights within an unpredictable environment feels. In ‘Dead in the Water’, Forget Them Wendy demonstrate this un-ending struggle of trying – and failing at times – to not to give up. The panic in the chorus whilst the person is fighting against actually drowning is always followed by said person becoming tired after all that struggle and beginning to sink again -rinse, repeat. The Sisyphus-esque plotline of ‘Dead in the Water’ comes to the bitter ending as outlined by the title after the final struggle of the song – the final chorus- becomes drowned out with a waterlogged outro.
The song ends with these feeble vocals and a blunt end “I’ve been sinking , I’ve been sinking, I’ve been dead in the water, I’ve been sinking , I’ve been sinking, I’ve been dead in the water {everything stops}”. This unfinished and anticlimactic ending comes from the fact we as listeners do not get a third repetition in the outro. We instead are swimming in this feeling of forced acceptance – and then – abrupt silence. The fact the cycle of fighting and accepting struggle throughout the song occurs three times only to have the outro to not have such a structure makes the so-called acceptance feel unbalanced. It sounds like the person’s consciousness has been cut-off and that they are -in fact- dead. The sound of struggle (the instruments) stop and the vocals (the person’s brain) stop and the listener has to deal with this lack of resolution because there is nothing more left of the song. The fact this end feels uncomfortable and cut short feels reflective of the person and their struggle and makes this metaphor and commentary on human struggle feel so much more relevant in the contemporary space as unlike tragic female characters from the literary and cultural canon, not everyone relaxes into a watery, romantic, calm ending.