As I write, September 25th seems like it’s going to be a long long day. Far too much of what makes the “average” shrink tick occupies my own allotment of infinity, where laboured breathing buffs up a damp silvery fog incumbent of what should be Thursday. Not for the first time, and most certainly not for the last, I have fallen hook line and sinker into yet another emotional spider’s web. Earlier I had resorted to the numbing comfort of the Romantics, the verbal haemorrhaging of Wordsworth, then Keats tangled up in a mystifying shade of blue offering shallow worthless recompense to a 21st Century lovesick boy. Both icons stood static, like the crushed flies on dusty pages, congealed blood as tributaries between ice cold letters, black as coal on the comatose fetishised editions. Turning my back on the staid purity of it all, flashbacks of empty summers slogging in a wharehouse trickled towards me, with a banjaxed CD player in the loading area as the only escape from the vengeful din of cackling fishwives. Favoured amongst the groovy part time staff, Love Is Hell sealed up the chasm with an empathy that was entirely self satisfactory, not that it mattered, when one is in the horrors, fake bonhomie would only defeat the purpose of the bruised heart healing itself through song. Empathy was for losers, something Adams and The Cardinals let everyone know with no uncertainty, a chiming jangle of chords wedged between Chris Isaak and Link Wray sat at the end of verses where delerium brought a strange sympathetic twist to the creeping Autumal ceremonies

“There’s strange weather/In the back of the room/And she’s pretty/Jesse’s spinning the tunes”

Call it angelic, ethereal, Adams is the fractured choirboy, in peril of crumbling under Brad Pemberton’s thumping neandrethal rhythms. Call it an accidental empathy, someone opens up their woes through the evils of unrequited love, and The Cardinals wail their own blues with a punky rejection of gormless submission to nature’s most potent killer of souls, something that can only be spawned through such a merciless condition

I could be serious but I’m just kiddin’ around/I could be anything, nothing, whatever, oh well/Love is hell

Yeah, love is hell alright, it’s a beast of burden, an ironic egaliterianism that can bring winter to a June day. But now it’s September and the real chill is on the way. Stay with us Ryan, keep us sane, the motions are with us again and November is peering through the cracks in the wall of a decprepid wharehouse. Love is hell, and this time the fog is so thick words of hope stifle the melodies drifting across another desolate morning after.