Within and without Within And Without, Amor Fati stands out in Ernest Greene’s discography, partly because it’s the most linearly pop-oriented Washed Out song to date, but mostly for it’s high-reaching ambition and philosophical pretention.
The typical Washed Out ambient atmospheres are here, although sounding more celestial, sounding like the elevator music playing on the way up to heaven. Or more accurately: Olympos. Ernest’s vocals aren’t shrouded in haze on Amor Fati, they’re embedded in white fluffly clouds, and he sings all the more triumphantly strong for it. All-knowingly authoritative and comfortingly angelic at the same time, he streches out vowels in barely intelligible words that at times resemble Latin more than English as if the song was written for a church choir. I actually wish it was all latin. A song so tremendously awe-inspiring would deserve to be written in such a classical and forgotten language. To me, it’s already a contender for song of the year. Any song that can encapsulate the beauty in one of my favourite philosophies: amor fati, to accept, submit yourself to, and learn to love your fate, deserves all appraisal. With this song Ernest Greene has built a tempel glorious enough to start a fucking religious movement around this thought, however contradictory and redundant that would be. The beauty is in the submission to your fate, not the devotion or will to change, interact with or build a temple to it.
Listen to Amor Fati on Spotify!
And make sure to watch the fantastically simple music video where Greene’s stand-in look-a-little-like Luke Rathborne does everything and nothing at all on beautiful Iceland. Even if it’s just four minutes long, you still get the feeling you’ve watched an entire movie.
