I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: TORRES-“Dressing America” (2020).

I’ve really enjoyed Torres’ music over the years.  I have seen her in concert twice and her live set is riveting.

Her earlier music was very intense and it seems as though her newer music is a bit more poppy.  This new song has a wonderfully catchy melody and her voice sounds fantastic.

Over a gentle guitar, she sings quietly in her lower register.  The song slowly builds up with keyboard swells and a quiet drum.

As the song heads into the chorus, she hits a lovely falsetto “to you” before the sweet chorus

I tend to sleep with my boots on
should I need to gallop over dark waters
to you
on short notice

The chorus has a fantastic delay between the falsetto “to you” (like in the bridge) and the “on short notice” that adds some nice drama.

It’s remarkably catchy (and the video is really sweet too).  I’m looking forward to the album and to seeing her live this Spring.

[READ: January 15, 2019] “The Sail and the Scupper”

This story begins with an epigram from The Canadian Press:

Massive numbers of dead starfish, clams, lobsters, and mussels have washed up on a western Nova Scotia beach, compounding the mysterious deaths of tens of thousands of herring in the area.

Ohm takes this idea and makes an unexpected story out of it.

The story is set in a bar.  A lobster named Homer enters and the bartender (a clam named Lewis) tells him he missed happy hour.

This sounds like the set up to a joke, but it is not.  Lewis looks around his empty bar that only last summer was brimming with herring–slapping fins, endlessly chattering.  The herring were always hanging around the newspaper reporters (like Homer) who were always stationed in this bar.  They were always trying to get scraps of information about what was happening to the water.

Soon enough they were itching for Direct Action.

When the time came for, Homer was at the front, reporting.  Self-preservation was no longer possible and it was time to fight back.  The herrings took to the beaches ready to face the enemy.  They wound up draped on rocks and eelgrass dying in the sun.

A lot of the bivalves thought they should head to deeper waters, but Lew didn’t want to give up his bar and his life.

While they were talking, Astrid, a sea star, came in.  Astrid was a huge supporter of the cause.  She raged against what was in the water: six-pack rings, oil slicks, the constant roar.

Homer said he loved the herring.  She teased him about this for what he has said in the past.  He admits that he loved them for the same reason he used to mock them: they think they can change the world.

Since this story is not a set up for a joke there is no funny ending.  And since it is an allegory for the earth, we can only hope that a resigned ending is better than an apocalyptic ending.