Matador/Southpaw, 2001
A quiet slow start of piano and …. it’s drums – cymbals or snares or the subway beneath the street.
Guitar that sounds like keyboard, then a keyboard.
The background full, a pointillist puncture in sonic gaps. Everything in space is not space. They fill it.
The sound that seemed like the speakers is now the snare shaking in the wake of us.
Break clean with the real beat, now, young men. And now sing.
*
At the concert you stand and feel as others do, that the mornings of forgetting and the nights of redress are joys. If you were to speak the words would fall from you in the shape of yellow sunrises, pink sunset slints. You feel a bass inside where your organs touch each other, flesh, shaking the room; feel the press of people behind and aside and in front; feel the drizzle of sweat creep down your thigh; feel the one small breeze that breaks into your face every few minutes as though someone has opened a door and let in a slice of the non-rock atmosphere from outside. Shut it again and press closer to the stage.
*
When the pressure of guitars is relieved there is a lightness to the notes, of falcons released, only from atop some tallest canopied peak. They hit the ground with all this weight now, strong now, waves wash us away now and we break,
clean,
into the new force of whatever we need when we stand, close, in darks, noses pressed to the air to hear this circle, around, again.
*
They dive and rise, and do it again.
