Duck & Cover :: Indie rock music writing from Arcade Fire to the Zygotic Minci

Guest post by Drew Zackary It doesn't take a pipe-smoking Frenchman writing novels about a godless universe to make me terrified of my own moral freedoms. James Johnson's chanting voice is enough. Baltimore-based Wilderness's 2006 EP Living Through should be played loud, ( as all Wilderness songs should be). The title track begins silent, the soft patter of rain the only sound for nearly a minute until the reverb-dripping guitar comes forward towards the listener. The bass and drums crash suddenly into a tight unexpected groove. Then it happens. That terrible voice of the Id muscles in. He chants, So here is to you and your situation / well hello to these trying times. But the tension is in the delivery. You truly have to hear it to feel it. Wilderness are a guitar player's wet dream. It's one of those bands that we hear and immediately wish we were in. With 2 previous full lengths, a self-titled, and Vessel States . This single is a good introduction to the b...

Math Rock Doesn't Die; It Simplifies To me, some bands can be compared to olives, in that it took me quite a few attempts before I could eat an olive without making a sour face. It may have something to do with the fact that my first olive was a giant, Spanish black olive (avec pip) that had been soaking in brine for, oh, probably five years. I ate it sitting on an airplane next to a girl, MB, who I'd had a crush on for about the same amount of time as the olive had been marinating. It was during a school-organized trip to Europe, and I was 18 (yes, I was 18 before I had an olive. You might think this odd until you remember that I grew up in Kansas). We had just been served our in-flight meals, and MB opened her sealed-in-plastic salad. She turned to me slowly, holding the salad out in offering, and asked, "Do you want my olive?" For a split second I hoped it was some odd metaphor for jumping her bones in the airplane toilet, but I quickly realised that, indeed, she d...

Dakin is in the middle of planning a trans-pacific move, from the blue water and flawless days of Hawaii to the cloud cover and drizzle of Seattle. Moving is always a difficult task, even if your move only takes you across town. When you cross oceans and time zones, a certain melancholy can take hold as you say "fare thee well" to a handful of new friends, while (in this case) falling back into the open arms of those that you had previously left behind. There is always an intrinsic feeling of being cheated that is imparted by the people you must doff your proverbial hat to, always accusations of some sort of abandonment... and why do they never understand that this is not an easy task? Perhaps things are different with each parting, as you leave your family in the midwest and follow dreams to the nw, then follow bigger (yet simpler) dreams to an island in a sea of blue, then, yet again, you chase even bigger dreams (is such a thing possible?) back to the fog and chill of t...