Reverse Death – Lilies on the Water
Up in the really hard-to-get-into universities, they’re desperately studying ancient rituals, African voodoo, and the chants of Middle Eastern people. For many doing the research, this has stopped being an intellectual pursuit a long time ago. Most of the people doing the research desperately want to believe in something.
Everyone, nowadays, is busy either trying to get admitted into a cult or looking to start one. There are no exceptions anymore. The ones who couldn’t fit in were asked to pack their things and make their way up the mountain, where they won’t bother anyone.
It’s a good time for bands like Reverse Death. It’s a good time to put your fate in the healing power of music, or just its potential to hijack your imagination and make your day more interesting. These are spiritual practices easily studied that provide quantifiable effects.
Reverse Death’s “Lilies on the Water” is music best heard using quality headphones and enjoyed while alone. The group rejects the requirement of 20-second jingles designed on laptops. Here’s music to get lost in, to praise and to even consider as the soundtrack for a snappy new cult. Why not? You could do worse! Music’s certainly a more sacred thing than old, bearded men raving about free love and organic farming.
Lily Vakili – Rocket
There’s no shortage of people writing love songs, and there never will be as long as the market demand stays the way that it always has. Truthful, powerful love songs, on the other hand, are hard to come by these days.
Nearly everyone, for example, admires Leonard Cohen for his compositions on the nature of human affection. But who’d dare sink that low to get to those words and the melodies that accompany them? Which songwriters have the strength to survive those kinds of love affairs?
Life will really wreck you if you let it. But if you don’t, how are you going to find the truly wonderful things worth writing about? This seems to be what Lily Vakili has dared to do, allowing herself to go down to the bottom in her pursuit.
“Rocket” by Lily Vakili resembles a Leonard Cohen composition more than just in tone and vocal delivery. Here’s a song about infatuation, loss and, inevitably, admiration for a person who inspired great passion, but didn’t stick around for the finale. It’s a real heartbreaker, and one can only imagine what it took to pen this one.
