Marsh responded to the cozy time frame with a disciplined, formalist approach, picking narratives out of the pop culture æther instead of a journal. The album kicks off with "Arrived," a sort of impossibly uplifting anthem whose plot he took from reality TV. "I knew from the cadence that it would have to be a narrative. And I knew where the consonants and vowels would have to line up and where the uplifting line needed to be. I eventually came across my content while watching this drug-addict episode of Intervention." "Would you believe he's up to week three and now he's just skin and bones?", Marsh asks in the song, gesturing to the struggling addict like a well-mannered Rod Serling who wants things to go right.
Don't Steal My Night Vision takes us through many gnarly tales of bottomed-out lives and relationships. In "Darwin's Club," belief in God is fought over as if it were an inherited gene. In "Settle Down Ghost," Marsh cheers on his depressed listeners: "Don't listen to the haunted ones/They're wrong, they're dead and wrong."
"We were kind of late bloomers," he concludes. "Most of the bands we were friends with four years ago have broken up and left, so we sometimes feel like the last band standing. I think it's helped us to start living in the moment instead of being afraid of it."
TAXPAYER + BON SAVANTS + AGE RINGS | Paradise Rock Club, 967 Comm Ave, Boston | March 13 at 8 pm | 18+ | $12 | 617.562.8800 orwww.thedise.com
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- Remasters of the universe
The adage “All things come to those who wait” tends not to find too many useful applications in rock and roll.
- Raw deals
How could I ever think that Kim and Kelley would let me down?
- Diminishing returns
For a while, Hold Steady lead singer Craig Finn wrote terrific stories.
- Future perfect
If you stood close to the stage, your torso bones rattled along with the backbeat.
- For olde times’ sake
Squirrel Nut Zippers aren’t just a cult band — they’re practically a cult.
- The call of the wild
It’s not easy being in a band whose two primary songwriters have quite different ideas about how to write an indie-rock song.
- Unstoppable force
“Basically it’s like, if you get what we’re doing, then no explanation is necessary, and if you don’t, then no explanation is possible.”
- Photos: Liz Phair, Exile in Boston (2008)
August 29, 2008 at the Paradise Rock Club, Boston MA
- Pedal pushers
The history of rock is littered with crazies who have craved nothing more than volume on top of volume, who have short-circuited themselves in the pursuit of the purity of noise.
- A real cut-up
Robert Pollard is a Renaissance man.
- Groop therapy
I can say without fear of clogging next week’s Letters section that Chemical Chords (the new Stereolab album, and their first on 4AD) is right up there in the top three Stereolab albums evah.
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Topics:
Music Features
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, Paradise Rock Club, Interpol, Soundgarden, Bang Camaro, Rod Serling, Taxpayer, Taxpayer, Lunch, Less
