Daily Listen by Brian Brock

Why? - Elephant Eyelash

Why?’s lyrics must be called addled, presumably by drugs.  They have the Neutral Milk Hotel quality of relentless particularity obfuscating universal truth.  In this, NMH creates a communion of listener and creator which, in my listening, shows that the universal is completely contained in the individual.  Philosophies and religions spend millennia describing the unity of self with all (atman is brahman, Jesus was god in the flesh, the Prime Mover is thought thinking itself), and in art we experience it in a moment.  I’m not kidding.  Maybe I should be.

The punctuation-defying Why? all too often slips out of the particular precisely when addressing the universal.  This becomes a problem, because the listener stops parsing the complicated bits and waits for the answers.  This actually further separates the universal from the individual.  The song I’ve “reblogged” here and “Waterfalls” (listen at lala.com) are among the best on the album as far as remaining within their self-determined perimeters.

Sounds like it was made in Ableton Live.

gregbrown:

Why? - Speech Bubbles

One of my favorite rainy-day songs.

Rain is millions of tiny
speech bubbles unused.
The collected breaths of mutes
and all our silent exhalations
where we should’ve put words,
or words we had no one to tell,
emptied from clouds
like cleaning horns’ spit valves,
coming back to us now
to remind us what we meant to say
or that we meant to say something.