seventeen.

[cabaretlights.livejournal.com]

Atlantic
Artist: The Midway State
Album: Paris or India
Year: 2011
♥: Alright, well, honestly -- I'm not sure why I thought I was going to post something other than this.

Sometimes songs have to grow on you (like...COUGH...some of Lady Gaga's new ones...), and sometimes you have to grow into songs -- another post for another time -- but sometimes you hear a song and instantly: it's love. Sometime Around Midnight is my prime example of that -- those last few notes and the car was turned around and heading to HMV (and thank GOD for Lexy's song identification feature!).

Atlantic was instant. Weekend before last, V and I were watching the MuchMusic Countdown, as we do. This video came on in all its grey loneliness, and I was already inclined to like it just from that starting aesthetic and those quick cuts. You can watch it here, if you're so inclined, but I haven't seen most of it because as soon as the first chorus started, I had jumped up to dance.

Now, okay: you'll listen to this and be like what the fuck jillian this is not a dancing song except that it is, it so is. Dancing, for me, is not an attractive activity. I am probably at my ugliest when I am dancing -- but I am also at my most honest. When I am dancing, really dancing, when a song makes me feel something absolutely visceral: I feel like I am channeling everything intense I feel and pushing it out into something physical. Nietzsche might call it giving form to chaos; I call it pure catharsis. So, of course, to stop and temper anything I am feeling by [insert dancing stereotype here: choreographing, or trying to get people to look at me, or even wondering if a song is 'appropriate' to dance to] would destroy the experience.

Rereading that, I sound melodramatic, but I don't really care because it's true. And: Atlantic makes me dance like that. It's the song I listened to on Tuesday morning when I woke up still drunk (and the song I gushed about before the fourth bottle of wine on Monday night -- is that cheating? Oh well.). The sky was hazy grey and I was still on some kind of strange high, and then that line:

If you could feel my fire rage for you.*

Fire and rage: two of my most beloved life-concepts.
I breathed in Montreal spring and stumbled a bit, and nothing mattered except my headphones and my heartbeat.


I love this song. I love its hook, his voice and the way it lilts, the drums and the three-note guitar riff at 1:27, lines like "Now it beats for you my love" and "Tonight I feel restless Atlantic hum", how everything builds to that last chorus and I almost can't help myself from throwing my head/arms back and grinning. Desperate, hopeful, alive: this is what a love song should be.


Oh -- and it mentions London. Just for you!


*an aside: this is a perfect example of what I was talking about in my comment for Paris -- the line is actually "reach for you", but I refuse to hear it. "Rage" means more.

Comments

[cabaretlights.livejournal.com]

I'm blowing this comm wide open and returning to comment on MY OWN post. WHAAAAAAT!


Just want to say that this song was such a catalyst I can't even believe it. I actually can't listen to it anymore because it makes me feel things from a time that feels SO LONG AGO, even though it was only a few weeks, and those things vibrate in ways I have no desire to deal with. Holy fuck. Music is so wrapped up in the time it's played, sometimes.

[amethysting.livejournal.com]

I think this was a grow on me/grow into situation...the first few times I listened to it, I just had the nagging feeling that it reminded me of something else, so, admittedly, I wasn't entirely focused on listening to the song...I just kept thinking...Snow Patrol? The Fray? Keane?

But I don't know, I started listening to it this week and I...felt different. I love how his voice sounds like it has been given a once-over by a steel wool pad...and hearing it this time...I just, I feel its desperation.

The video makes me heart-sick for London. It makes the separation of the Atlantic seem a bazillion miles wide. I love, "London's wild, but I'm alone". That feeling of being part of all of the action, or surrounded by people, but feeling alone despite that.

And, it is only during these later listens that I've noticed the chimes or church bells about three-quarters of the way through...lovely. Lovely and sad and danceable all at once.




And frick man...some songs...ASIDE: "Love Profusion" by Madonna popped up on shuffle and I was sitting beside the pool in my neighbour's backyard...and it's like I could feel the song crawling under my skin and it was 2007 again and I started to notice all the similarities between things I'm feeling now and what I felt then...it freaked me out.