Mew, "And the Glass-Handed Kites"

A week ago, I rolled out of bed, into the car, and the colors had changed. It wasn't autumn yet, but it soon would be. Sometimes around here, for a day or two, the world will pretend it is already the next season to come, like foreshadowing in some novel. The sky is still cloudless, blazing blue, oblivious that below, things are gray golden and softer. The sky will know soon, and follow suit.

Mew was on the stereo, and I realized that their album And the Glass-Handed Kites was one of those autumn albums, and I may start pulling it out every autumn, the way I do Mercury Rev's Other Deserter's Songs and Grandaddy's Sophtware Slump. Some albums fit autumn better than others, with its mix of glowing light and the first hint of darkness. Mew has something of both, with its minor keys, its off-balance guitar work, meandering, unresolved verses flowing into soaring, almost ethereal choruses, impossibly high falsettos, triumphant synthesizers. Things feel urgent, perpetually changing. Their sound is one of juxtaposition, making you feel the dense, difficult ground before they send you flying like one of those black birds wheeling south, their fluttering shadows making the light flash, as their wings hide and reveal the sun behind, hurting your eyes.

We Are the Village Green Preservation Society

I find myself devouring liner notes again. One of my favorite states of being. Private elation. A desire to tell everyone about it. To burn twenty copies and give them out to friends and would-be friends, hoping to turn them on. Always wanting to share joys.

I was deterred from this album by Robert in the late 90's (holy shit the bass line in "The Last of the Steam Powered Trains" -- before the tempo quickens-- it gives me shivers). He dismissed it with a quick one-liner. Overhyped or something. But I find this album so adventurous, intense, really present, really now. And sincere. It's just got everything. Robert could maybe use another listen.

Well maybe I wasn't ready for this in the late nineties. What was I listening to? Anything vaguely psychedelic? Well yeah, actually. But it's good to space loves out. So you can always discover things, and maybe have a constant stream of thrills carrying you through to old age.

I keep thinking, oh my god, I'm twenty-nine. I must be aging, because I'm listening to Donovan or Leonard Cohen -- like "easy listening" for the musically curious. But goddammit I've been listening to Cohen since I was nineteen. I just am not changing all that much, at least on certain levels. Maybe the biggest thing that's changed is an admission, a coming out of the closet of sorts. I like country -- there I said it. A small, well-lit corner of country- Gillian Welch, M Ward, and the like. Please don't come at me with knives, or set me afloat on an iceberg, waving farewell in your seal-skin coats.