So songs like the excellent Suburbia and Talk Me Down pick over small-town boredom and a yearning for physical contact respectively, while even the more extrovert Wild and Youth are suffused with cool melancholy.
Even though "Secus" starts with dancers kicking up a storm in bursts of private, extreme aggression, there is a cool melancholy running throughout the piece, which culminates with the performers, one by one, flashing bits of their flesh, as if to show that a body is a body, and a person is a person.
His affair with Edith is partly a campaign of covert aggression against Hank, and also against Terry, whose disorderly housekeeping and emotional volatility stand in vivid contrast to Edith's cool, genteel melancholy.
Her clear, calm voice is one of serene mystery and subtle melancholy: cool but never detached.
Being unguarded and sort of melancholy was cool.
In such moments, sitting beneath the stars on a cool and quiet night, melancholy takes on a beauty that is very close to romance.
Massive Attack's members weren't the first Britons to rap in their native accents, – Rodney P of the London Posse beat them to it by some years – but Adrian "Tricky" Thaws was certainly the first person to realise a West Country burr could communicate a kind of heavy-lidded, melancholy-streaked cool.
Instead, she discovered a place largely unfamiliar, and her photographs steer blessedly clear of melancholy and moralizing; they're cool, matter of fact, not art but honest and true.
The vocals are plaintive to the point of whining, but the inner voices have a cool, contrapuntal flow, creating the sort of muscular melancholy so characteristic of postwar rhythm and blues.
Although it forces you to work within pre-defined parameters you're more or less improvising within the existing template of a melancholy holiday jingle it's still pretty cool, especially in its anonymous collaboration aspect.
He doesn't have the brooding, melancholy glamour that gives Batman his edgy cool.
