Mister Rode

After second "translucent face"

It's..."my mirror dissolves every day"

No vistas (?) for No rich door?

I'm very unsure about that, Grimo, but no less so than what I had, so I switched it since it fits slightly better. The lyrics are hard to transcribe because he says very counter-intuitive things. I just changed "I bang on the doors" to " a barrel of doors," which is obviously less likely semantically but I can't hear "bang" any more. And "I gotta show medical doors" is said enough times that I am kind of confident it's correct, but it doesn't really make much sense. I don't mind him saying things the brain doesn't want to fill in the gaps of because of their oddness--in fact it's one of the cool things about the Fall--but I wish he'd enunciate them more clearly sometimes. I mean, you can slur "baby I love you" but you should pronounce "I got a look translucent face" a little more clearly for the sake of the transcriber.

I went back to "rich door" after listening to the vinyl version.

Yes, Rik, that is better.

An Ode to Mr R?

Maybe; who's Mr. R?

Not sure, but it would at least fit in with the rest of the Remainderer EP (Remainder R, Rememberence R, Mister R). I'm speculating that Smith was playing around with titles and put R and Ode together to get Rode.

As he is a passenger, or traveller, Mister Rode's name is entirely appropriate.

The lyrics are a meditation on identity and anonymity, from the perspectives of, first, a passenger at a subway or commuter rail station, second, a patient about to be wheeled into surgery in a hospital, and third, a soul boarding an airplane and experiencing its subsequent takeoff.

At the subway station, as the train arrives, our protagonist sees his "translucent face" reflected in the windows of the train as it slows to a stop (and, through his translucent image, he sees the faces of the anonymous passengers inside the train--thus the "mirror" that "dissolves every day". The chorus asserts identity in the context of that most anonymizing of modern activities, packing onto a train, with all the awkward glance-avoiding etiquette that accompanies it.

In the second vignette, the protagonist observes that he has "gotta show medical doors", which tidily sets the scene--he is going to be wheeled into some part of a hospital. He muses over: his distrust of "wank doctors", the "tricolours seen every day"(?), "summers all in a day" (a line possibly filched from the Ray Bradbury short story "All Summer in a Day") and hospital disinfectant, among other things.

His anxiety growing, he mordantly observes that, rich or poor, all go through the same swinging doors. As he slips into full-blown anesthesia/paranoia, he encourages the doctors toward their putative (in his paranoid estimation) task: "gotta kill!"

(The chorus of this verse serves a different purpose--to have a name and a matching face in this environment is reassuring, as it lessens the chance of having a leg sawed off when one should have had one's tonsils removed instead. OTOH, one indeed has a name when it is attached by a tag to one's toe as well.)

In the final tableaux, passengers are boarding a "barrel of doors" that also has wings--an intercontinental jet. Our protagonist has "a name and a seat", and negotiates his way down the aisles until he arrives at his appointed place.

The final lyric, "It's taking off, it said, and took off" is accompanied by a swelling instrumental run-up that starts cheese-ily enough with childlike puttering noises provided by Eleni's keyboard, but then gains a Mancabilly intensity that has an oddly transcendent quality (which could be said to be a quality obtained by the song in general).

At the very beginning of Mister Rode, the melody starts with a descending four-note figure (by itself on the promo/vinyl version, behind "I got a face" on the digital) that is strongly reminiscent of church bells ringing changes. (It seems familiar--I poked around the internet, listening to the changes rung at various churches in hopes of stumbling on it, but no such luck.) Gradually, that figure transforms (via a tacked-on inversion) into something raga-like, aided by Peter Greenway's sinuous, sitar-ish voicing and phrasing, ranged against twin drummers playing loopy, shambolic complementary patterns.

Church bells? Changes? Perhaps.
But at the least, MES here revisits the weighty topics of existence and mortality and seems to be, if not entirely reconciled to the latter, at least somewhat accommodated to it.

@SlightlyDislocated: As a church bellringer, I can say that in my experience the four-note riff doesn't obviously mimic any obvious changes that we ring. That's not to say that you couldn't reproduce it if you had bells of the appropriate notes, but it's not common in my 25-ish years experience.

I'm getting Lance Armstrong's downfall from this. Yellow, tricolors, people "having a say." Seems around the same time. Wish I had a bit more to go on.

For what it's worth, Cooper Clarke I Married A Monster From Outer Space:
"each time I see her translucent face
I remember the monster from outer space"

It's worth a note, that's what its worth!

RØDE is a brand of microphone. Another case of naming a song after a piece of performing equipment (cf Hot Cake guitar pedals)?

(following on from previous comment) if you have a say you might use a microphone to say it.

I'd be surprised if this was about Lance Armstrong (11. Wrayx8) but I can certainly add to that theory...

A reference to 'tricolours' could mean the French flag.

'Summers were all in a day'. In one day Armstrong had his name ripped from the record books. The Tour takes place in July.

Armstrong famously recovered from cancer, there are plenty of medical/hospital references in the song.

'I got a name, I got a face'. Another reference to being removed from cycling history perhaps.

'It just came and then it stopped.' Is this the money and sponsorship that dried up after the report into his doping was completed. Armstrong estimates he lost $75m in one day.

Is the 'translucent face' a way of pointing out that his denials became more see-through?

'Lemon freshness' - Former Tour winner Greg Lemond was a big critic of Armstrong. Or is lemon the shade of yellow in the Tour De France leader's jersey?

Mister (Armstrong) Rode (a bicycle)

Rode is a common Surname in Germany.
Mark, spent some time in hospital in Germany around 2009.
Maybe Mr. Rode was a fellow patient or Doctor?

One of the Doctor’s who headed the clinic in Auschwitz was named Dr. Rohde.

I was reading testimony from the Eichmann Trial and was reminded of this song: http://www.nizkor.com/hweb/people/e/eichmann-adolf/transcripts/Sessions/Session-069-01.html

I gotta show medical doors
All right
Gonna kill [i][/i]

etc, etc.

A tale of man so desperate for meaning in the face of liquid and vanishing identity/one’s own mortality that any organization, cause or activity will do, no matter how terrible and hideous?

“I got a name, I got a say”

Also, “it came in tricolours with headband”—red, black and white?

The headband the leather strap on the Nazi Death’s head cap perhaps?

Maybe a deliberate confusion of victim and persecutor? The predicament universalized, the aging and coming apart, even this character struggling with loss of meaning once his precious party dissolves. The transit imagery could be the trains that with brutal and absurd efficiency transported so many to their deaths.

“They had a name, they had a say”

But also, the ephemerality of events, of whole movements, of whole races: gone, suddenly. And with them their secrets, hopes and turmoils. Collective memory relying on exhumed scraps, the dead doomed to be forgotten or misunderstood by posterity.