This has been another very hectic time in the Ox compound, what with copious amounts of work cutting into the precious amounts of time I wish to spend in front of my computer, writing about the wonderful, wonderful music this great big blue ball of liquid, solid, and gas has to offer us.

Hopefully, I will be able to shirk some responsibilities and return to a more regular schedule this week. I will take great strides into doing so.

But, in the meantime, I have some Rated Ox catching up to do as I hadn’t done enough write-ups the week before, so here is the list of my ten favourite songs I wrote about in the past two weeks.

In order of appearance:

• Firewater - Feels Like The End Of The World
• Mudhoney - I’m Now
• Mezzanine Owls - Snow Globe
• Music Go Music - Light Of Love
• My Education - Arch
• The Corto Maltese - Providence
• Radars To The Sky - Victoria
• Anthem In - Down
• Spygirl - Today
• Meho Plaza - The Beach

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 They usually aren’t aware of how anxiety-stricken I can be, which is often superseded by my typical good humour, and that definitely creates a striking dichotomy when it comes to my musical tastes.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

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