Firewater
Sidestepping the optimist in me
I try to be an optimist in most things I do. For instance, I try to write only about music I like as opposed to wasting energy on delivering negative viewpoints on songs I dislike. I see an early take on a brand new day when my baby girl wakes up before 6 a.m. I feel that missing the bus will simply allow me more time to listen to my iPod.
For such usual “glass is half full” approaches to little irritants, many friends have pointed out that I sure enjoy rather depressing songs. They usually aren’t aware of how anxiety-stricken I can be, which is often superseded by my typical good humour, and that definitely creates a striking dichotomy when it comes to my musical tastes. I enjoy a good, wrenchingly tortuous song as much as an airy pop tune, much to the surprise of most folks.
Once again, this situation is underlined with my love for Firewater. I got completely attached to Feels Like The End Of The World, which could quite possibly win the prize for most self-descriptive song title of the year. The jangling apocalyptic guitar licks set the tone for singer Tod A’s gravelly, dingy voice, pronouncing lyrics of such piercingly grave implication, only a bottle of a steamy bar’s strongest spirits can blur reality enough into a consolatory haze. Apparently Tod A spent a couple of years going through India, Pakistan, and Turkey, and has allowed the rich musical traditions of these areas to inflect the song full of sitar-like twangs, tribalistic sufi percussion, and jingly tambourines, thusly endowing it with a strangeness both exotic and perturbing to our Western ears. The aura is of unfamiliarity and desolation, disparagingly filthy and rotten to the core, befogged in a song which is deft in execution, audaciously cathartic, and deucedly mesmeric.
MP3: Firewater - Feels Like The End Of The World
www.firewater.tv
myspace.com/realfirewater
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Comments
May 12th, 2008 | 10:24 pm
your post reminds me of moonlight by mono. it’s definitely one of my favorite songs, and i’ve only discovered it recently. sounds like the end of the world.
it’s on my last.fm page and fortunately it looks like they have the full track posted if you’re interested in taking a listen.
it builds very nicely, and has the typical soft-loud-soft progression that most post-rock songs seem to, but the payoff is great.
and when i listen to songs such as the firewater one you posted, i am labeled my my friends as ‘emobrock’. ha.
May 24th, 2008 | 11:48 pm
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