The Unguarded Moment

by chrome3d

First of all, I want to say that I feel unworthy to review this song. To me it´s just a song without any deeper meaning or story when I first heard it. Only a lot later than 1989, when I got this album in then hypermodern CD-format, did I even knew it had been some kind of hit.

So deep, deep without a meaning
I knew you'd find me leaving
Tell those friends with cameras for eyes
That their hands don't make me hang
They only make me feel like breathing
In an unguarded moment

A lot of the lyrics in Unguarded Moment feel almost throwaway stuff. Rifles for minds? Cameras for eyes? All of the songs in OSAH, while clearly executed by young band still show mature skills in songwriting. It´s not like there is a huge quantum leap from OSAH to TBC in terms of songwriting. SK was ready to produce songs that last and are still interesting enough to explore in 2009 and beyond. In his blog recently SK lambasted Oasis and Liam Callagher and dismissed Liam´s songwriting completely based on his first sketch of a song ´Little James´. I wanted to say that Liam has actually written many more songs later that are probably better. It´s not a big deal if your first songs are sketchy, Liam just got bigger exposure to his sketch than 99,99% of other starting songwriters. I don´t know as I don´t actually follow Oasis. I just feel that this song is the Oasis-moment for the band if that´s some funny connection. Anyway, SK is in a position where he doesn´t actually need to shame anything he has done in the past and even OSAH is quality stuff. The Unguarded Moment, however, feels a bit sketchy and most of the lines are just lines that doesn´t connect that brilliantly. There is also the line "So deep, deep without a meaning" that strangely enough is brilliant and goes on to define the whole album and even large part of the band´s career.

It´s just that it´s a great simple rock song that appeals to many people. It was written and done faster than others (?) and it then lacks the perhaps disturbing intellectual sheen that the other songs have. This is The Church stripped bare of most of it´s complexities, while they still do exist under the surface. Many great songs have been done this way, just to fill a void in the album. Take a simple riff and sing some fast daa-daa on top of it. Some of them end up as hits, some go to b-sides. This is the ´Paranoid´of the band. Luckily it was not the last big hit they did. If it had been the last hit then the image of the band would have been considerably different than what it is now.