Twin Dive – ievelė
Sure, there are numerous music fans who desperately just want things to stay the same. They’re the ones who used to send angry letters to bands’ management offices whenever their favourite group dared to embrace a new direction, and they’re the same people typing angry messages to modern bands’ online posts.
But you do have to feel sorry for those people in some regard. Change scares them. Change makes them feel irrelevant. It forces them to have to adapt to a whole new world just about at the time that they finally got used to the one in which they were. Bands like Twin Dive, daring to blend cultures, sounds, and fashion ideas, are something that might take a while to wrap your head around. But it’s well worth making the effort.
In fairness, Twin Dive sounds, and looks, like a premier corporate event band, the kind that gets invited to play the parties of forward-thinking billionaires. They’re stylish Lithuanians who reinvent Eastern European folklore motifs to make them sound like American gospel meets blues. And, most importantly, they bring a confidence and rowdiness to the performance without which this would simply not work.
Sock Drawer – Fishes
Truth be told, I never much cared about Ozzy Osbourne’s solo career until I saw him singing beautifully off-key, choked up and struggling to deliver every single word at what turned out to be his final concert. That was just beautiful. It wasn’t just the obvious struggle involved, or the fact that, for once, the guy backstage doing most of the vocals hadn’t been summoned. It was a wholly human moment.
And it was a reminder of how lucky we are to participate in any type of creative endeavour, whether as artist or audience, as much and as often as we possibly can. Sock Drawer’s musicians know this, but it’s the vast majority of us who need a constant reminder. The string can break at any moment, the drummer gets arthritis and can’t hold up a drum stick, or a dumb war erupts and you’re picked up off the street and asked to courageously die in the name of some cause that nobody can quite explain to you!
“Enjoy every sandwich,” was Warren Zevon’s parting message to the world. But, make some time to enjoy every anxious-filled moment playing or listening to music might be the additional nugget of wisdom that Sock Drawer wants to deliver to the world with the gentle, fragile “Fishes.” It’s a good song to add to a holiday playlist designed for your final Christmas. It may well not be. But just the fact that the possibility very much exists makes it all the more heartbreaking.
