I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: THE BODY-“Empty Heath” (2010).

This is Viking’s fourth pick for album of the year.  (I skipped number three because it is an acoustic finger picked-instrumental album which I liked fine but which wasn’t anything special to me).  The Body is a fascinating band, and they are hard to learn anything definitive about online.   But if you’re looking for the album, All the Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood, you can get it on Amazon, or (cheaper) from At a Loss Recordings.

This song opens quietly with a person saying “together.”   It’s followed by a fascinating chorus singing what sounds like possibly Peruvian throat singing.  And then the guitars bash in.  Heavy droning guitars (with a screaming “lead” vocalist buried in the mix).  The song often stutters to a halt only to pick up the doom and mysterious gloom.

The notes about this album say that it is a duo (why is some of the heaviest, most menacing music made by duos?)  At some point in the song, the music stops and you hear just the chanting (which now sounds like it’s reversed vocals).  I have no idea what to make of this song or if the rest of the disc sounds like this, but I’m really intrigued by it.  Viking calls it “the most surreal doom-metal record of 2010” and I agree.

[READ: December 30, 2010] ”Dealing with the Dead”

Jenifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad is on my short list of books to read this January so I was intrigued to read this little piece by her.

Her Something Borrowed article (the third in the series) is quite different from the others.  It begins with a fairly shocking account of her mother’s robbery at gunpoint. She had been working in a gallery and the robbers thought they would have cash on hand (they didn’t).  There was talk of shooting them until they were inadvertently rescued by a delivery man.

This rather exciting story mellows out pretty quickly in to a far more reflective and mellow story.

Egan’s mother no longer wants the skirt she was wearing during the incident, so Egan takes it, modifies it, and wears it a lot.  And this embracing of the bad is what her piece is all about.  Not all of the bad is quite so traumatic.  For the most part, the article focuses on when relatives die; she takes an article of theirs and makes it her own.

At first the clothing is imbued with the dead person’s scent (her kids recognized their grandfather’s smell), but eventually it becomes her item.  Mens’ sweaters, costume jewelry, they are her way of remembering her loved ones.  And rather than thinking of it as morbid or weird (as her husband does), she thinks of it as a physical memento.

It’s a nice sentiment.