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You’ll Never Get To Heaven

The song of forgiveness

20 juin 2024

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Many of our contemporaries experience some form of physical loneliness and a stark contrast between a dull material life and a rich and creative mental existence. In this specific context it feels only natural that shoegaze, a musical genre popular in the late eighties and early nineties, would resurface today. Outside of the philosophy of education, constructivism as an ideology does not currently have a real figurehead, leading intellectual or star writer. We must therefore talk about a blurred movement which nevertheless has great success in the musical field. We can call “constructivist music” the songs and sounds that invite more than just introspection and melancholy, but succeed in plunging us into a state of grace where our ego, our pretensions are extinguished by a wave of hypnotic sweetness. We therefore prefer the word “constructivist music” to the more or less known name of dream pop, because this type of sound does not truly immerse us in a dream, but reconstructs reality. This painless siren melody invites us to experience an alternative reality, thrills of the skin, caresses of an invisible hand, and succeeds in giving us the same effect as the physical presence of a loved one. You'll never get to heaven has taken up the torch from Slowdive to magnify a new musical genre which carries more than mere sensations, but genuine feelings to a sound. Our band consists of a duo, that of Alice Hansen and Chuck Blazevic, and has put out three albums: one self-titled in 2012, the second entitled Images in 2017 and the last in 2021 called Wave Your Moonlight Hat For The Snowfall Train. They also offered the public an Extended Play entitled Adorn in 2014.

 

 

Dawn’s early light imbued with black and grey

As shattered embers glow where your head lays

Friends reduced to means on the promise of a dream

Saying nothing, speaking loud

Love is dead beyond the clouds

 

Beyond The Clouds (2017)

As these magnificent verses from the song Beyond the Clouds say, millennials dream of a dematerialized loved one. A generation marked by repeated heartbreaks and death of the soul throws itself onto alternative modes of love: we seek to combine movements of the soul and an awakening of the senses other than through the encounter of a human ideal. We achieve this suprasensible state by listening to songs with a heavy spiritual charge, and You’ll Never Get To Heaven is the most accomplished, the most striking of the musical projects enabling this new kind of experience.

 

 

I never dreamed it would be like this

Better and worse

Memory and habit leave me anhedonic

Memories of all the things

That were slowly killing me

And the habit of always remembering

 

Eye, Soul and Hand (2021)

 

 

You’ll Never Get To Heaven becomes an angelic lullaby shockingly reminding us of our own banality, of the fact that we all go through the same physiological and sentimental states. We can lower our guard, kill our ego the wounds of which altered our senses. We find shelter in an empty dimension that we can fill at our own leisure thanks to the forgiveness which has now been granted by us to our own selves. The celestial voice of Alice Hansen and the magical sounds assembled in tandem with Chuck Blazevic give us a chance at redemption, the ability to live again in a new world after we succeeded at shedding our emotional waste.

 

 

Deep in the abyss

Where nothing new, eludes the path

And so tightly bound

To all that’s known

You’re what you are

 

Exquisie Tension (2017)

 

 

Our Canadian group assembled in London, Ontario, has a spiritual identity that we cannot ignore. The forgiveness of ourselves follows the forgiveness to ourselves, as if different layers of consciousness that acted as former foes could be set ablaze. Introspection is no longer an active phenomenon but rather a passive state of mind allowing us to receive our own Tables of the Law. Our shortcomings and flaws become blatant as we leave the shores of the physical world to enter the continent of illusion and hope. You’ll Never Get to Heaven is a unique band. We have the privilege to live at a time where such a marvel can emerge and allow music to transcend its' very nature. Constructivism is now a fulfilled promise and we can live in a self-generated reality.

Translated in english by the writer and André Léssine.

The french version of this text was published in HUIS CLOS #5, the spring-summer 2024 issue of HUIS CLOS, the arts & ideas magazine.

La version française de ce texte a été publiée dans HUIS CLOS #5, le numéro de printemps-été 2024 de HUIS CLOS, la revue d’arts & d’idées.

Photo © You’ll Never Get To Heaven.

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