sluggo – First Flight
Man, I hate patriotism. But I’m starting to feel pretty lonely, in my opinion. Most of my peers are getting gigantic chest-covering tattoos of semi-fictional historical figures and proclaiming their loyalty to their country.
The only thing worse than that is a similarly exaggerated view of one’s hometown or city. Many people define their whole existence through the city in which they were born. It’s sad, rather pointless, and makes for bland pop songs a la “New York, New York.”
Bleah! You don’t owe your country anything. And, unless fate has been particularly kind to you and allowed you to grow up in Prague or Oslo, you don’t owe much to the city of your birth either. It’s not like it owes you a living or cheap housing.
Few people are as cynical as I am when it comes to this nostalgia-related problem. Fortunately, I was able to locate one in Australian-born sluggo. “First Flight” is charming, funny, and bittersweet about life back home. It sucks, the songwriter assures us. As it should! sluggo wants to see the world and get to see his family on holidays. He thinks enough of his listeners to tell them. Plus, as one Aussie pubgoer recently told me, crashing into kangaroos on cross-country drives is a real problem down there. Who’s gonna get used to that?
The Melonbars – The Cowboy
Back in the 1950s, in the “Golden Age of Westerns,” you could probably make a good bet that it would one day end. Most trends, especially those that are Hollywood-financed, eventually die out.
But you’d be hard-pressed to make a prognosis about cowboy flicks becoming a medium for serious filmmakers. And, it would’ve seemed even more baffling if a time-traveler would describe these movies of the future as “slow, meditative, questioning of life’s meaning.”
Well, real men don’t shoot guns anymore. They dream of riding alone through the mountains, sleeping under the stars, and thinking about things. About serious things. That’s the movie they’d like to play in. And, they’d be happy if a revived John Wayne came along with them, funny walk and all.
The Melonbars’ “The Cowboy” is one such dream of great, beautiful loneliness among great, beautifully deserted mountains or deserts. What’s so great about those? Well, to paraphrase T.E. Lawrence: “They’re clean!” So is The Melonbars’ music. Funny, too, and just a little bit lo-fi. It’s the kind of band The National should take on tour now that The Silver Jews are forevermore unavailable.
