Cadillac Ranch, or We Bury Our Baby Blue Sedans

Quickly for the record:

Day: 7/11/06
Song: We Bury Our Dead Alive
Artist: Yaphet Kotto
Source: We Bury Our Dead Alive
After a quiet, clean intro, a wall of distorted guitars kicks in, not quite at hardcore tempos but with a more interesting rhythm. The vocals are somewhere between a roar and a scream, like the dude is about to burst. The whole thing gets transformed into something beautiful and empowering, but no less urgent, with the introduction of a high guitar line that seems to skip above the fray, like wire-based kung fu movie stunt. Simply DIY punk/emo/hardcore at its best. An amazing emotionally charged, politically influenced song about conscience and the duties and hopes thereof.

Day: 7/13/06
Song: Baby Blue Sedan
Artist: Modest Mouse
Source: Building Nothing out of Something
At least once a year this song will pop intself into my head. Usually in the summer because that's when I listened to this album the first time around.

Isaac Brock has a good ear for clever lyrical twists. The most obvious one here is the "I miss you when your around/I never miss you when I'm by myself" inversion, but I've always been a bigger fan of "henry you dance like a woodfooted indian" myself. The way he sings it, it sounds like an old couple teasing each other (perhaps thats due to the derth of Henrys these days) although perhaps I just hold on to that as a corrective to the feeling isolation and ennui of the rest of the song.