Rawrrawr riot!

Rhumb Line (n):
-1 an imaginary line on the earth's surface cutting all meridians at the same angle, used as the standard method of plotting a ship's course on a chart.
-2 any of the 32 points of the compass.
-3 Ra Ra Riot's only album; indie rock touched on by a Korg board, violin, and Broadway musical sentiment.

Some day I'm going to go off the the big city, dress all in black with red lipstick, dance all night and sleep all day, the usual. But then my favorite lover will bring me back to his home town and we'll live in the house he grew up in and have wednesday night dinners and thursday night cocktails with all our friends who followed us home. Soon enough the whole town will be taken over by the forever young and beautiful. Between spilled red wine and pregnancy yoga we'll all become parents of beautifully brunette children with matching, thick, eyelashes. We'll push up our wire framed glasses and smooth away their (naturally) disheveled hair to read them Saderis and Hornby, just so the girls will be heart breakers and the boys will let them. When we have time between Safi's hip hop recitals and Jermiah's art opening at the community center, we'll attend town meetings. And this is how our home town anthem will become "St Peter's Day Festival" from Ra Ra Riots 2008 album, The Rhumb Line.

So, this is normally where one might expect a little analysis, some comparison, perhaps even an allusion or two to side projects (hold on! There is one coming in a bit!) - but, I ran into the bizarre problem of realizing this is the most impossible song to broadcast in the whole world! For being featured on a band's only album, it is certainly pretending to be a b-side rarity saved for some "High Fidelity" type situation. In-uploadable to grooveshark, sound cloud, non existent on youtube and last.fm; Ladies and Gents, I tried really hard but inevitably these boys have made it impossible to spread their love. So, thusly, why waste time talking about a song you'll never hear? Why tantalize you with real content when you'll never be able to formulate your own opinion? Frankly, I would be doing you a disservice to continue talking about a song that speaks for itself, if ever heard.

And so, faithful readers, I instead leave you with a nice tid bit and an enjoyable cover: Ra Ra Riot's Wes Miles teamed up with Vampire Weekend's Rostam Batmanglij in the electo duet known as Discovery. On their self titled LP they covered Ra Ra Riot's "Can You Tell?" (re-christened "Can You Discover?" haha, hoho).

So to salvage this less than musical post, I leave you with Ra Ra Riot on Ra Ra Riot

Bombay Bicycle Club Taking Over My Life

Kite flying and daisy chains finally have a soundtrack. Somewhere between the steel drum and the lyrics every girl and boy wants to be written about them, this became my favorite album of the winter time. Not that it hasn't be around for long enough (release date July '09), but as all albums it takes time to float to the top of my flashdrive pile. The album starts off strong in a soft sort of way with easy chord progressions synthed up by an armature, but as soon as the lofty intros cut out the sentiment of three note swings along with the musical equivalent of a warm breeze more then make up for it. Although the second half of the album drags a bit (tracks such as "Autumn" give you the sense that maybe love isn't really worth it), any fan of artful simplicity will be happy to listen all the way through.

The cover art, shot in the english equivalent to Prospect Park, speaks for the album. Throw someone above a crowd and they are king, they run the world, they are in love and they are happy. However, let them fall and they are wrecked, staying in relationships for comfort, sleep deprived and just "inches above the dust on the ground."

Something about the way Jack Steadman, lead vocalist, always sounds like he's about to break out into tears and bass lines worthy of the types of european parties you always hear about where boys dance and girls all ware backless dresses makes this album worthy of repeat. In the end, I now have completely unrelastic expectations that some boy with love me desperately enough that he will be "willing to owe [me] anything." I guess for now I'll just have to keep at the single "Evening/Morning" which I had the music fans unfortunate incident of declaring my favorite song on the album only to discover it to be the single.

Listen here