Bluesday, August 9: Rx Bandits

I couldn't take the fucketry today. And then I saw a tour announcement poster for the 10 year anniversary of ...And the Battle Begun. It's my second favourite Rx Bandits album (behind The Resignation), which had a large hand in shaping my politics straight outta high school. I kinda can't believe it's been 10 years.  I remember seeing them at the old Bottom Lounge in Chicago when it was still off the Belmont Red Line station. I'd totally see them again, even without the horn section they used to have. They're remarkably good at painting continuity within the album, stroke by stroke, telling a story that has a beginning, middle, and end. We're transported into a different part of the world, the one we're taught to ignore: the place where we create fantasies, into Matt Embree's optimistic brain.

"At the end of the world we'll all have a big party from sea to sea and into the desert sands / we'll feel comfortable naked, won't need our prescriptions to say we're happy and admit we're all scared of growing old" - Epoxi-Lips

Bluesday, August 2: La Vie en Rose

At what point in your life do you stop believing in destiny? Does growing-into-this-world mean losing that certain charm, that more than just whimsical attraction, that kind of lustful hope of a bad romance, intensity spilling over the gut of what is supposed to make sense? I re-watched How I Met Your Mother to catch all of the things I didn't catch before, and I guess this time around, I understand human relationships a little bit more. How the aftershock can cause a lasting effect, or doesn't, but how it can leave a mark, or won't. Perhaps I can make a compromise with this world. Perhaps synchronicity is real, and that fate is not always buried beneath a pile of casualties, dead weight one carries along the way. But how to manage mania, especially the kind that toys with the figurines in this never-less-than-romantic head: that's the real growing-into-this-world, I think. Perhaps then... maybe then, you can stop believing in destiny, and actually start living it.

I'll always be a sucker for beautiful, soaring melodies, even when they aren't soaring.