Quick Before it Melts

Saturday 27 December 2008

I was a cloud

It’s winter and it’s raining, and that doesn’t feel right.  It’s a juxtaposition of feelings, like when a person you hate does something nice for you, or your best friend makes a snarky, jealous remark about your new boyfriend.  You know it’s not improbable, but it still feels wrong.

I find that the only way to set these days, when up is down and down it out and out in back in again, is to fill them with song.  You can choose almost any old album and it will somehow fit into the fabric of the day, but today, for me, there seems to be no more appropriate album for a cold, rainy, winter’s day than Rook, by Shearwater.  From the window outside my den, I can hear the gentle tapping of rain water against the side of the house, see the stray drops fall from the bare branches of my magnolia tree, and imagine the feel of the cold bluster of wind moving those same branches in time to “Home Life”.  The song titles themselves seem custom made for days like today (“On the Death of the Waters”  and “The Snow Leopard” in particular), but it’s the haunting majesty of the music that is Shearwater’s most arresting feature (as it should be).  Jonathan Meiburg’s dulcet vocal tones become an axillary instrument next to the harp, glockenspiel and dulcimer used on Rook; you don’t necessarily care what he’s saying, but you sense what he’s feeling, and it’s heavy, heady, and haunting.  Rook won’t chase the storm clouds away, but in its own special way, it will make all that’s wrong with the outer world seem right.

MP3: Shearwater “The Snow Leopard”
Myspace: Shearwater
Buy: Shearwater Rook

Tweet

by J. Di Gioia | 3 Comments »

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 27th, 2008 at 10:00 am and is filed under MP3. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.