171. Song No. 2,581: “Distance,” Fanfarlo
Let’s Go Extinct, 2014

For an entity that required an awful lot of tries before it finally took, Fanfarlo quickly went from exactly one song I suddenly couldn’t stop playing to a band I couldn’t get enough of.

I’ve already gushed at great length about this evolutionarily themed concept album and why I love it; while it wasn’t the album that made me fall for Fanfarlo, Let’s Go Extinct wasted no time establishing itself as my favorite of their albums, and the stretch of songs from its second track (the aforelinked “Cell Song”) to the sixth one (“Landlocked”) is a rock-solid run comprising five songs that just might win the Longest Span of Infinitely Repeatable Tracks award. I mean, the whole thing is fabulous from beginning to end but there is something special about nearly the entire front half of the album. It’s five goddamned tracks of “Oh, shit, I meant to repeat that song agai—ooooohhhhh, wait, but I do love this one, too…,” which is really the best feeling an album can inspire, especially song after song after song.

I want to say that “A Distance” just ekes out as my favorite among this ambitiously divine collection, but I also feel like that just might be because it’s the one I’m thinking about and listening to the most right now by virtue of writing about it. It also has the most easily parsed thesis—looooortt, are humans ever hopeless when it comes to communicating our deepest needs and truest selves, and even worse at comprehending others’ fumbling attempts to do the same—which made it one of the first of Let’s Go Extinct‘s songs to hook me.

And for there being an ’80s-sized hole in my musical tastes, songs that are clearly inspired by the synthiest era ever charm the absolute hell out of me, so “A Distance” is all but fated to become a song I can play for an entire days’ commute and still not get sick of it. The whole album has an unmistakably ’80s feel to it, honestly, which balances out the kind of darker or denser themes into an overall neutrality and washes it in the existential shrug of ‘Meh, we can’t do much about the things we can’t control so why not find reasons to dance your way through the parts that don’t objectively suck.’

But most of all, I just love this song. It could have easily become one I did manage to overplay, but being couched in a collection of equally infinitely enjoyable songs beautifully illustrated its album’s theme of everything being part of something bigger’s grand design. There are a lot of songs I love superficially but immensely simply because I like how they sound; there are songs that, like all good writing, feel fully formed and completely lived-in because they carry this weight that makes them seem less like entertainment and more like a slice of life and a sense of belonging. This is one of those songs, and it is a transportive kind of magic that everyone deserves.