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.