new radiant storm king
LEFTOVER BLUES (2004)
liner notes (2)
| Music doesn't need anything, except maybe some silence around it. Music definitely doesn't need poetry, and most of the time gets along fine without any words at all. Poetry needs music like a lack needs someone to feel it. Huh? In poetry, you can't feel the silence it's up against, the fundamentally ludicrous act of trying to say anything at all in the face of the Great Big Maybe No One's There, without music. A whistle in the dark isn't one with only breath and dark. Without music, poetry combines the fun of a phrenology midterm with the usefulness of flossing a marmot. It's a big waste of no one's time. I'm not sure you talk "about" music any more than you can talk "about" how you feel. Say how you feel. I feel this music has poetry not just in the words, which talk to me in ways that feel intimiate and public, and never restrict themselves to "subject matters," or in this case, textures, appropriate for rock. In this music everything is alive and clanging in a way that feels totally organized but somehow fundamentally busted. Which to me is poetry. Poetry is news that stays news. Stalked by giant contraptions these pop songs sleep eyes open in the valley of serious danger. The song swings around to find the note it hung and I one chime of many copiously thrum. I feel if there were any justice, which there is, this band would be huge, which they are . They happen to be just what you want. Each song is someone who knows you very well but hasn't seen you in a long time bringing you something you didn't know you needed if you you were near them. You are. -Mathew Zapruder, Minneapolis, October 2003 |
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