Wednesday, July 04, 2007

Dirt roads, wind

Caribou - Sandy

Last week I moved from Sydney to Brisbane. Over the past couple of days I’ve been moving my stuff into my new bachelor pad. It’s a mansion! Everyone lives in mansions here. There’s a garden, a palm tree, another big tree of which the species I am unsure, two verandas, a large living room/veranda, big dining room with windows all around, a lounge. Oh boy. When I look out my kitchen window I see ants and then gardens and space, not a brick wall. Under my house there is a ping-pong table and a drum kit and out on the front porch there are couches and lights that make me want to listen to My Morning Jacket every day as the sun is going down.

It’s really hot here though. My main worry is that my watch is going to leave a tan line. A bigger worry though is the speakers that I bought for $10 from a second hand shop. They’re brown, SANYO and veneer and the proprietor assured me that they work fine. Why wouldn’t they? I mean, sure, they’re from the 70s. turns out they don’t really work particular well at all. They seem to distort everything quite severely. For a moment I thought ‘Hey this could open up some new possibilities in listening for me. All my records will sound different!’. But then I just realized that when I put on Closer it sounded like Loveless. Then I put on the Always Gross Odour 7” but even that sounded like early Slowdive. Not in a good way, and no, not ideal, then.

So, on go my headphones and out comes Caribou’s new record Andorra. I’d listened to this a few times the other day but never noticed how great it is. It’s much better than The Milk Of Human Kindness. A friend of mine expressed distaste towards the lyrical content (‘I just don’t think he’s a particularly good lyricist!’) but they’re just all about imagery really. More so, it’s their delivery and effects laid on them. They sound distant and hazy and positively euphoric; perfect for that time of late afternoon that I feel like I’m obsessed with, when the light’s all low and glary and little seedlings are illuminated in the sky. Anyway, his lyrics, they’re sort of a moot point of the record. Or maybe I just don't pay enough attention to words in songs. I worry about that sometimes. People I know can sing along word for word to many an album but all I can really remember is two thirds of Hatful of Hollow and that’s not really a mean feat. Maybe I could take a stab at leaning those from ‘Sandy’. He’s getting so very 60’s on this song it and feels like Woodstock or something. Those guitars! They wear those orangey tinted aviators. But I see what my friend meant about lyrics: ‘Sometimes in her eyes I see forever’. That’s cool, Dan. I’m feeling pretty loved up myself right now so I can dig on that.

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