Overboard and Down

One day I'd been out buying a shovel and a pH testing kit and I heard The President's Dead on the radio. Rapid fire narrative, cheap trick emotions, it has no right to work. But as with most of what Okkervil River offers it works wonderfully.

I only bought the song tonight, tracked it down after months of fitful searches. $10 for a song, well five songs but I was only buying it with certainty for the opening cut. The four others are fine but not as immediate as President with its imagining of Kennedy's head buckling as "black dressed agents" move fast to a dead man. Not that the song is necessarily about Jack, it's more about the phrase "the President's dead' and what happens on the day it's first stuttered and by day's end typed in 72 point print. Will Sheff sings the words forcefully, there is no disbelief in his repetition or his story when he talks about "lying in bed with my girlfriend" until he heard "three words they said, like three shots to my head, the President's dead".

It gives thought as well, in the context of now, to that Obama factoid of his secret service detail being the largest of any nominee.

The first time I heard the song it seemed so much longer than it's 2:42 minutes. Hearing good songs for the first time is always a chance to slow the space time continuum, to catch breath and always to go to another place. To remove myself from the worry of having spent too much on my steel shovel, to ignore the fucking idiot refusing to use indicators when changing lanes on the Parkway, to smile.

Live From a Shark Cage

Papa M’s Live From a Shark Cage is playing at the other end of the house.
I’m lying in bed listening to the beeping of a blood pressure monitor, waiting for the spearing pain to start so I can note it on a chart for the doctor.
Earlier today the X-ray beams of The CT scanner punched through my head, the whiring medical machine dissecting a brain in pain.

I’ve been listening to old music lately. Not for sentimentality and not because there is nothing that inspires in 2008. Simply because it’s worth returning, worth re-comprehending why certain songs make me feel. Much music nowadays makes me feel nothing. When I’m in the gym the confected rage of my youth doesn’t boil over during 104 point whatever’s ad free 50, anyhow I have a soft spot for Coldplay. When my girlfriend surfs through the four commercial radio stations here it pisses me off because I can’t hear a full song, not because all the songs I hear are shit.

So when a song does prick the emotional conscience it does it in a tremendous way. Pajo’s Crowd of One did it to me after coming home this morning. It’s buzzing angst was most likely nailed as pre-millennial tension originally, for me it worked just as well in feeding my “there’s no need to worry anxiousnees”. Confused, telephoned voices blip in and out while Pajo mumbles with his guitar.

Then there's the first voice: "we're calling to give you the day for the test, can you give us a call at 75-803-90 and we'll let you know the day".

Calenture

The latest in a growing list of reissues for The Triffids, it was obvious that Calenture, more than any other of the West Australian band's works, would benefit immensely from box-setting, remastering, glossing up.

Bury Me Deep In Love somehow appears thicker, if possible more enveloping and Kelly's Blues is wilder, more forlorn.

But 21 years on what remains is Dave McComb's songwriting. I've been partial to Unmade Love for a little while now. McComb's ability to walk between esoteric and poetic is singular and what initially drew me in. It's only one thing that keeps me listening. Listen again to this song and hear the occasional caterwauling in the background, the reverb on McComb's voice and the distant organ aching. All this works against the screwed tight drumming with McComb: "I'm not getting any stronger, just let me sleep a little longer" telling us his destiny.

It's a welcome delight to see The Panics and others willingly embracing a legacy of literature and song and making music that is peculiar to the land of the Nullarbor and the Earth's most isolated capital.