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Play With Fire
The Birthday Massacre
Hide and Seek
2012

♥: I love midnight.
I love what it represents (the precipice, the moment of transition, the moment with the most possibility), what it stirs (fear, a sense of cultural creepiness -- midnight starts the witching hour, and you don't fuck with that), and what it looks like. No matter what season, in Montreal, midnight is a black sky. Sometimes, depending how far out you go, it might be dotted with stars and a bright moon -- and midnight is beautiful in Rigaud.

On a clear night, the sky is endless constellations, shining down on trees and casting dark shadows on the ground; in the fall, when the leaves have fallen, you might as well be in a horror movie. The middle of a forest is a disturbing place to be when it is dark outside. Sometimes, I stand outside before I go to bed, and I try to remove all the houses and all the civilization from my immediate surroundings. Would I have survived, in the forest, at midnight?

But, that's not something we have to worry about (anymore, or maybe, yet). So I go back inside, lock the door, and curl up in bed.

I read Janne Teller's Nothing through midnight on one of those such nights, in bed with the windows open, crisp fall air slowly filling my room as the hours slipped by, transfixed by a story detailing exactly why there is no hope, no future. This song was on repeat the whole time this story had hold of me, one of those surprisingly rare experiences when a book is perfectly defined by the atmosphere of a song.

I love The Birthday Massacre, and have consistently placed them among my top bands for almost a decade. Though I admit most of their songs sound the same, I kind of don't care because I love their formula so much. Their particular brand of goth-industrial synthpop doesn't seem to translate as well when other bands try to pick it up -- there is something special; uniquely dark and visceral, about how the Birthday Massacre uses their electronics -- Chibi's little-girl voice -- their purple-and-black colour scheme. And each album has a standout track, for me, one that breaks the mold a bit, and pushes them in an ever-so-slightly different direction. "Play With Fire" is Hide and Seek's -- the perfect meld of a creepy atmosphere, beautifully blended synths, and a gorgeous, haunting melody (especially in the refrain). No other soundtrack possible for an existentialist young adult novel, really --- and how it sounds like midnight -- the middle of the night, twisting and spinning and disturbed and a little like the end of the world; violent and unsettled.



But it's easy to forget that midnight is a boundary, a shift; midnight is the start of another day, new possibilities -- and, after all, Nothing is not as bleak as all that. We create our own meaning, after all -- we play with fire. Sometimes we get burned. Sometimes, though,
we catch on flame.