My dear friend in London sent me a mail today simply titled:
“reading dinosaur comics while accidentally listening to Humpback Oak on itunes shuffle”
From http://www.qwantz.com/archive/001269.html
Archive for July, 2008
Photo from http://flickr.com/photos/sharizal/
There’s always a siren calling you to shipwreck, and if you’re sailing along these straits, that voice may well be Linda Ong’s. Linda sings with an unplaceable weight, a memory trail of enchantment and heartbreak, fully laden, boulder of devastation and desire. This becomes all too clear if you catch Lunarin on a rare acoustic occasion. Shake off the layers of that consummate hard rock leviathan, hide their stomp boxes, unplug guitar cables (even dismantle those electronic drum pads that Eng Teck has started using since mid-2008), and you’ll discover that the wounds really run much deeper, that every song is a bruised and tiny fist trying to lift itself again. “The Chrysalis” is the last song they wrote for their debut album and also its title track, a song setting words to flesh, with its “inspiration” refrain so uplifting and precious that it is sung only once. At song’s end, as words “fade into the sun” and last notes are plucked, unflagging, the audience erupts and fists are raised.
mp3: Lunarin – The Chrysalis (live at Inhabitant, Feb 12, 2005)
Photo from http://filterpaper.net/gallery/
When did aspidistrafly become one word? Or rather, when did a s p i d i s t r a f l y become thirteen letters, even-tempered, stark and disparate? I’m not entirely sure. Back at the Tesseract gig held at the Substation in 2003, they were still Aspidistra Fly– but the spaces were always there from the start, the eloquent pauses between strums, ethereal haze of vocals wafting between audio drags. On this rendition of “No Chance of Reconciliation”, April and Ricks removed the song’s hypnotically scattered beats (as heard on their notoriously impossible-to-find first EP) to create the prettiest funeral dirge I’d ever heard. It was their debut gig and I hadn’t realised it then, but right from the start, a s p i d i s t r a f l y were ghosts, and their song would haunt me through time, chase me through the gaps between night and morning, prodding bleakness, sad reminders.
mp3: a s p i d i s t r a f l y – No Chance of Reconciliation (live at The Tesseract, Dec 16, 2003)
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