Love can drive you mad. Not in that, “Oh, I’m drowning in a cat-and-mouse game of my emotions” where love is a positive emotion that just jerks you around a bit. No, on “Systems of Unlimited Love” we’re looking at what love does to the no longer initiated, to the person that cut off from the world, to the saint that went cold blooded machine because empathy to the world around them was destructive.

In that way, love to the parched heart can feel like “exploding against a wall, like a can of paint or a wrecking ball”. It scars you, it paints you with marks of anarchy, and then detonates what’s left of you. Dramatic? Not really: what most love songs don’t get is that not everyone’s all arms wide open to the emotion, many of us have degrees of coldness towards it, some of us are completely fucking frozen.  Face it head on for once, and if it drives you insane, the system around you–the people who buy into the illusions, the one who are open to everything–see death as the only escape for why you’re just not trying harder to get it.

It’s this complex understanding of human emotions that makes When Saints Go Machine one of my favorite bands. Despite “Fail Forever” being my 11th top life song, every new single coming off their new LP has been absolutely exquisite and “System of Unlimited Love” is no exception.

 Beyond just the brilliant synth work present in the arrangement, When Saints Go Machine have coupled that feeling of love’s fragility into their new video. Synchronized pole dancing would be just titillation to a lesser band, but for them it’s a metaphor for what would happen if you dug deeper into an illusory performance of affection…the entire idea would fall apart.

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