Nick Rallo has stupid crazy Cetacean swag at Whale Fight.
Nobody knows the hot months better than Ray Bradbury. The cool smell of lightning, and the snug tennis shoes on your freshly socked feet: Mr. Electrico from Something Wicked This Way Comes is summer. Personally, I don’t get tired of reading about it–the same way when you’re a kid with a flashlight in the dark. You find new things. Luckily, Bradbury is still around to talk about it:
Last week, he spoke at Barnes and Noble about his new book, “We’ll Always Have Paris.” The collection focuses on his forty-year love affair with France and, not surprisingly (or cliched at all), love itself. He raised his hands to the crowd–his palms out like he was blessing us: “My hands are antennae. I feel everything. If you want to write you have to stop thinking.” These songs do that to me–they dilate the eyes and stop you from thinking–they’re good, crisp songs about a rush of feelings. It’s what this mix is about: an explosion. An overload of the senses, like the huge surging-to-the-stars twelve string guitar in “Closer to Heaven,” or the whiskey sadness in “Golden.” Bradbury wrote about it, and damn it’s true. To him, the summer was about the circus–to me it’s about music.
There are a thousand songs about love, but these inspire something entirely different. They’re subversive. It’s like a magic trick–you know you’re supposed to hear in these songs, but something new and risky is happening to challenge you. You want a love song? Here’s a cacophonous drum explosion (“Early Aubade,” by Roman Candle), or the eerie and magical verse in Red Cave “I went out past the willow and the well / caught my breath upon the hill / at the edge of the domain” — it’s like lightning (or in Harlem’s case, a bunch of drugs). Take what you want from love songs, there’s ton of them, but that doesn’t mean they’re bad. And it doesn’t have to be cliche. It can just be a big circus.
http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?5y5cttnj4gg
1. Can’t You Wait – Geographer (4:26)
2. Early Aubade – Roman Candle (3:40)
3. Blood Red Sentimental Blues – Cotton Jones (4:36)
4. Closer to Heaven – Pink Mountaintops (4:51)
5. Devil in the Water – Matt Pond PA (5:28)
6. This Wind – Tallest Man on Earth (3:24)
7. Witch Greens – Harlem (2:43)
8. Steel on Steel – J. Tillman (2:32)
9. Middle Cyclone – Neko Case (3:06)
10. Northern Lights – Bowerbirds (2:53)
11. Night Walks – Black Mountain (3:57)
12. Golden – My Morning Jacket (5:26)
13. Talk on Indolence – Avett Brothers (3:40)
14. Grim Reaper Blues – Entrance (4:32)
15. Digging in the Ground – Doug Paisley (4:58)
16. Red Cave – Yeasayer (4:59)
