"Dump" is the fifth track off of Time 'n' Place.
Composition[]
With the ending of Flyway being described by Sarah Midori Perry as an "anti-transition", the song begins with a very slow and quiet beat. Sarah claims that Gus "mindlessly plays the same one-bar drum pattern for the entire song". Sarah claimed that the group was interested in doing something so simple it could be done in drum machine, but doing it in person so it would sound "ever-so-slightly different". The song's creation started with these verse chords, which are played on a very lo-fi Casio DM-100 sampler using a long note sung into the onboard mic. The slowed-down field recording in the song plays throughout the entire track. Sarah claims it is "another example of the mysterious, detailed, messy textures we created with hardware and left in to purposefully muddy the water". The song ends with a bell ring played backwards, which transitions into Make Believe.
Meaning[]
"Dump" is about a literal dump ground. According to Sarah, the song was written specifically about the Waldo Depot Waste Disposal Site in Bromley, which is so close to Gus's childhood home that you can smell it when the weather gets hot. The song is a melancholy piece about how people discard things that were once important to them once they no longer want them. Sarah claims: "The dump has a uniquely strange atmosphere; it's one of the few places where we confront the freakish reality behind our comfortable, largely virtual lifestyles."
Lyrics[]
Show the man a pass and
Everything you've got
Go to where he points and
Throw it all on top
Hear the crunching beneath the junk let go
A parrot cage and dial phones
Blue for small electrics
Microwaves in here
Television pieces
In a rusty skip
But be careful if you brought chemicals
They've got a place especially for those
And there's always a busy crowd around
People come from all over town (over town)
Dropping off the things that they no longer need to keep
Everybody's collage
Stacking up the wall
When the sun is out the
Scent gets pretty tall
But the site operators don't care much
They're looking forward to their lunch
And when we fill it up
A lorry comes and drags it on the tarmac
Somewhere far from here
So when they let us in
At six A.M.
The spaces are empty again
And there's always a busy crowd around
People come from all over town (over town)
Dropping off the things that they no longer need to keep
Trivia[]
- According to Sarah, an early version of the song that ended up becoming "Dump" was titled "Pericoronitis", with lyrics addressing the affliction of the same name, suffered by young adults everywhere as their wisdom teeth emerge. It was inspired by a series of painful bouts the group experienced.
- The line about the parrot cage in the dump is a subtle reference to the previous song on the album, "Flyway". Flyway is about birds flying away once the weather gets too cold for them, and a cage being in the dump would imply the bird has left, so the owner no longer has a use for its cage.