This was the first Benji Hughes song I heard. I was playing poker at a friend's place, his Sirius was playing, and this song was announced by a deejay with a bit of paused reverence in his voice. I remember feeling just a twinge of anticipation because it wasn't normal to hear that slightly awed tone in a deejay's introduction. The song played. Poker vaporized.
The voice... the absolutely spectral, dancing musical phrasing of the verse melody, the macabre soundscape, the sophisticated descending chord progression... Not just a standard descent either, but this lurching, lurking fall by strange, slightly too-large intervals with batty inversions.
Then the chorus burst, and my hairs stood.
A smashing chorus of cymbal-laden drums, wildly bending guitar harmonies, and an even more jagged, interval-enjambing melody, still in that ghostly, grunting double-tracked voice. The chord changes bent in unnatural ways, the musical equivalent of a body dropped 10 stories into the roof of a clown car.
Then the guitar solo began, this howling, gnashing emittance amongst cathartic drums and vampiric keyboards, and I had to leave the poker table and take a break from being any form of a person. I just got my pocket notebook the hell out so I could write down this musician's name the moment the song was over. And I didn't want it to be over.
The lyrics, as with most Benji Hughes songs, were instantly memorizable because they were so well crafted for clarity, both aurally and conceptually. They tell a little tale of sad love between circus freaks, just pathetic enough to be humble, just fateful enough for these characters to be operatic. In the climax line, the internal rhymes, consonances, and assonances are some of the most ambitiously and competently executed poetry in all rock music I've heard:
"And as they kiss they seem to miss that that little dogs and elephants are staring."
The entire lyric sheet is full of deft, daft sound and wordplay.
Musically and lyrically, the song is an utter gem.
And Benji Hughes is barely acknowledged for his feats.