Just acquired a bunch of new CDs and thought I'd post a track from each. But hey: that would be a lot of writing, if I were to actually describe all of them in any kind of detail. Solution: eight haiku, of course. (Tracks chosen quasi-randomly from the middle of the CDs.)
Bruford One of a Kind (used) "The Abingdon Chasp":
bass impersonates
elegant sumo wrestlers;
keys a whiff of cheese
Iggy Pop Blah-Blah-Blah (used) "Cry for Love":
iguana smothered
in neon big-drum coked-out
glossy trash traffic
Baxter Dury Len Parrot's Memorial Lift (used) "Bachelor":
not his father's block
heads for the beach, boys filtered
through smoky glamour
Lansing-Dreiden The Dividing Island (used) "Our Next Breath":
this firm produces
ads for abstract glass buildings
glimpsed through shrouding fog
Matthew Friedberger Winter Women / Holy Ghost Language School "Don't You Remember?":
Dear Sir or Madam:
Please find telegram, enclosed:
my heart, in crayon
Now It's Overhead Dark Light Daybreak "Dark Light Daybreak":
who drowned this water,
burnt this fire, and scattered
dried-leaf paragraphs?
Pere Ubu Why I Hate Women "Mona":
Cartoon sestinas,
leather-jacket circuses,
why can't I hold sand?
TV On the Radio Return to Cookie Mountain "Wolf Like Me":
Bells ring underground,
quill from claw I write life in
hell's erasing ink
2 comments:
This is one of my favorite entries of yours, ever.
Dear Sir or Madam:
Please find telegram, enclosed:
my heart, in crayon
Thanks, Paula! Incidentally, most of these were written in the three or four minutes the song was playing, and most try to capture something about the specific song (although some are more about the album as a whole, and occasionally I consulted lyrics to verify what I thought I was hearing). That Friedberger CD (and the Fiery Furnaces generally) is fascinating to me: I'm not entirely sure I actually like it, but both musically and lyrically, he's very hard to tie down in terms of audible/legible influences. It's rare that I can say that someone sounds original (and usually, though not so much with the song I posted, I can say the same about TV on the Radio). In particular I find his lyrical world bizarrely fascinating: in the comments field of the mp3 tag, I wrote "post-Burroughsian steampunk romance" - which is, I suppose, as close as I can come to it. The lyrics seem cut-and-pasted from 19th century novels, catalogues of outmoded office equipment, and travelogues. Sometimes, there's a semi-coherent narrative (the other disc, Holy Ghost Language School, is nearly parsible as a story..."nearly," I say) but more often, it shifts from focus as frequently as the music.
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