CESIE – I’m Tired
I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest that would-be artists ought to voluntarily sacrifice their happiness and sabotage their personal relationships. But it couldn’t hurt the work.
While certainly not a ticket toward guaranteed artistic success, enough bitterness, misery and the blues can really make a project tick. But, sure, too much of that potent cocktail is enough to keep anyone laying in bed for days on end.
But how many great love songs have been written, really? OK, most of the songs ever written deal with love, lust, and affection of some kind. But the really good ones are few and we tend to overplay them. The next time you hear an Eastern European violinist playing “With or Without You” in a London train station, think about that.
CESIE has produced a great, poetic indie-rock track. It’s called “I’m Tired,” and it has the potential to reach a wide audience. But was it created in spite of the anguish that the singer describes or because of it? You know what I think. Those excellent rhymes and vocal lines, delivered with all that venom, have to be powered by something. Either way, we’re the proud recipients. If anything, CESIE has run a successful autopsy for all to see.
Consumables – Infinite Games
Would the members of Pavement dare to be as carefree as they were in their glorious first incarnation? Would Kannberg and Malkmus not be afraid for their lives every time they wrote a non-sensical song?
The fact is that people are out there searching for meaning at a pace that even the 1960s health food supporters weren’t doing. And the ones that haven’t started searching yet are just looking for some time off from their job and enough dough to visit the shamans of Peru.
Yeah, it takes guts to be a slacker nowadays. Give it a few more years, and they’ll be as obsolete and exotic as the hippies. You’ll probably only see slackers occasionally when they’re being thrown into police vans and escorted to a factory where they’ll do forced labour.
Consumables write and play like Pavement. They’re just as charming and as quick with a melody or a joke. But they’re tense. “Infinite Games” is inspired by spending months in jail for wee possession. Try telling that to the kids in Prague or Amsterdam. Yeah, things are getting heavy, and if you ain’t looking for anything, there’s no reason asking people to join up with you. The slacker, and the hippies are done for and Consumables is providing the soundtrack.
