Terra Twin – Again and Again
Memories ain’t nothing. They shouldn’t scare you. They have little power over you. At least, not as much as they could have. The brain’s cleverly wired in such a way that many of the worst nights and most tense mornings that you’ve ever lived through are buried underneath less important information like how much a carton of milk costs nowadays. Can you imagine what life would be like if that weren’t true?
But the good news of the true daredevils is that memories can be excavated. Like any relic buried under a ton of rubble, getting down out of there quickly is the only way to ensure that they haven’t been ravished and smashed by time. The longer you wait, the more you drift away from them and the less of their form you can see. In fact, once enough time has elapsed, all you’ll have of the times that you’re trying to recall are some misplaced feelings.
Terra Twin’s “Again and Again” sounds like a session with an expensive hypnotherapist trying to help the patient recall things that happened such a long time ago that it’s difficult to even make assumptions about whether those things are real or imagined. Then again, the brain doesn’t really know the difference, and the emotions that those events suggest are powerful enough to inspire this nostalgia-powered indie-rock tune, a vague feeling about one of the most eventful days in one’s life.
DahL – Deep Space
Famously T.S. Eliot said, “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion.” He also claimed that poetry isn’t written to be examined but to be felt. This must be a great consolation to all of the high-school students in England who can make neither heads nor tails of the author’s work, but, occasionally, when they try really hard not to try at all, manage to feel a gentle breeze coming from the words.
But how does the poet actually get to do those things and stop, instead, from just focusing on getting “shoe” to rhyme with “who” and “glue?” And why should this merely be the burden of the poet when all artists ought to try and do the same? That’s something we ask ourselves very little nowadays when it comes to pop music – an offspring of classic poetry. Now that everyone is trying to find the formula that will provide them with a hit, few are bothered with the art of searching for the sake of the search.
DahL without a map and no True North to guide the band on “Deep Space.” This is clearly a recipe for either over-indulgent pop-rock music or the ingredients for finding the kinds of truths that aren’t available at first glance. Luckily, the psych-tinged, indie-soul sounds produced by the band managed to do the latter. They take the band and the listener to a place that wouldn’t have been available on a typical verse-chorus-verse composition and make you excited about all of the other sounds and songs not yet discovered.
